Bishops and Priests (Consecration and Ordination of Women) Measure

Debate between Lord Mackay of Clashfern and Lord Tyler

Tuesday 14th October 2014 Lords Chamber

[Lord Mackay of Clashfern (Con)]

My Lords, I happen to be a Presbyterian and am associated with a church that is established in a different way north of the border but still in the United Kingdom. I want to emphasise, as strongly as I can, that we are dealing here with a decision by the Church of England. The Measure has been decided on by the Church of England and the role of Members of this House is to approve it so that it becomes part of the law of England. I particularly want to emphasise that it was for the Church of England to decide this, not Parliament. The Church of England has now decided it and it is for Parliament simply to approve it so that it becomes part of the law of England.

[Lord Tyler (LD)]

My Lords, I want to contribute briefly this evening because I was very moved by what my noble friend Lord Cormack said earlier. I should say, by way of background, that I come from a long line of Anglican priests. Indeed, I am the black sheep of the family, having fallen into politics, which is regarded by the rest of the family as being disastrous in that respect. My grandfather, a Cornish parson, was so horrified by the way in which Parliament treated the 1928 prayer book that he became convinced it was necessary to disestablish the Church of England. I follow in that respect, too.

I want to express my appreciation of what my noble friend Lord Cormack said earlier because his generosity should, I hope, be shared by others who may be disappointed, or even dismayed, by the way in which this Measure has come forward. I rejoice in the way it has come forward. I recollect very well a service in Truro Cathedral, on a bright, beautiful Cornish day nearly 20 years ago, when the then bishop, who had voted in the Synod against the Measure for the ordination of women, preached eloquently to us, expressing the most moving reason for changing his mind. He recollected that in the New Testament, in the Acts of the Apostles, the Almighty had given guidance to those who were voting on a decision to replace one of the apostles. He said, “What is good enough for the Apostles is good enough for me”. As part of that very moving ceremony, when he presented the seven candidates with a bible, he also presented them with a bunch of sweet peas, which he had picked from his garden that morning. It was a very moving moment when he, who had been relatively opposed to the ordination of women, said that he accepted the outcome of that vote. I hope that those who may now be concerned, apprehensive, worried or even dismayed will not only listen to my noble friend in the way in which he has accepted the outcome of this process but may also remember the words of that very distinguished Bishop of Truro.

Transparency of Lobbying, Non-Party Campaigning and Trade Union Administration Bill

Debate between Lord Mackay of Clashfern and Lord Tyler

Tuesday 5th November 2013 Lords Chamber

[Lord Tyler]

My Lords, my Amendment 63 comes within this group. It is an extremely important amendment and one that is so central to the Bill that I hope there will be general agreement with its purpose. It may not be in perfect form; that is a different matter.

The amendment would insist that, alongside, there would be a central database of meetings between Ministers and external organisations, as recorded under the Ministerial Code. As the Minister said earlier, and as has been said on other occasions, not least at Second Reading, there is wide agreement across your Lordships’ House that the movement towards more transparency on meetings, with reports from various Ministers about what meetings have taken place with outside organisations, has been a major step forward under the present coalition Government. In fact, I was astonished to learn that this is the first Government to proactively publish the details of such meetings.

There is nevertheless a concept known among transparency campaigners as “hidden in plain sight”. That means that important information about who is bringing influence to bear in government may be published but may still be obscured by the form in which it is published. That is the issue to which I made reference at Second Reading and to which the noble Lord, Lord Campbell-Savours, made reference earlier, when we had a brief exchange. That is critical to making progress in this direction.

To find out who Tesco has met in government over the past 12 months, you need to go manually to each of 26 different departmental websites, and then you have to look at spreadsheets for each quarter. There are therefore 104 spreadsheets that you need to find, and you then need to download them—just to get one simple bit of information: who has Tesco been talking to over the past 12 months? You will probably find that one or two departments have not even got around to publishing for the latest quarter, so it is not in real time. Indeed, by the time that department does publish that information, the influence that has been exerted over important legislation might have come and gone, right through Parliament. There is simply no opportunity to see what has happened.

You might find that one or two departments have broken or defective links that lead nowhere; we discovered that when we looked at some of the relevant spreadsheets. Surely it should not be necessary for a citizen, journalist or indeed parliamentarian to spend days looking for such simple information. The technology is there. Having made such a good start, this Government should surely not be hiding what is happening at this level simply because the systems that they are using are not up to the job.

If the Government took up the suggestion in our amendment, a simple and searchable central database for all their meeting data would mean that we could take the sting out of the calls, here and elsewhere, for an enormous lobbying register. We would have immediate access. This would fulfil my noble friend Lord Norton of Louth’s objectives: we would have the information, very accessibly, at our fingertips very quickly. It would not matter whether the lobbyist was a professional consultant or an in-house one, a charity or some other organisation; the information about who was talking to whom within the governmental system would be available relatively accessibly.

In my office we started to try to put together the spreadsheets for different departments. We just did two or three departments for one quarter in order to see if this experiment could be undertaken by anyone—parliamentarians or people outside. Excel itself can then produce a list of external organisations that have met Ministers. Quickly we could see who had met Ministers in more than one department, right across Whitehall. Surely that should be the objective that we all have. If we can do that in my office, there is no reason why departments and the Government collectively should not and could not do so. If it was done professionally, the data would then need to be parsed to ensure that if a meeting with BT came up, for example, it was indicated whether the meeting was registered as with BT, with BT Group or in other formats. Clearly there has to be some moderating intervention, but in this day and age that is surely not too difficult or expensive a task to ask of Government in the interests of transparency, which is surely what this initiative is all about. Then the result will be a fully searchable database, online, for all to examine—interested citizens, organisations outside Parliament, journalists and us. We could see what exactly had happened in the process of influencing legislation or executive decisions.

To make it more effective still, government departments should surely be able to publish these data at least on a monthly basis. Previously the Minister explained that he records very carefully all such meetings. Why should other Ministers not do so on a monthly basis rather than a quarterly basis? Surely that is no more difficult than doing so on a wider time basis. Anyone who has tried to influence the Government knows that time is critical. Get in at the right moment, or you fail. Given the way in which legislation, particularly statutory instruments, can go through both Houses of Parliament relatively speedily, if you do not know who has talked to whom within a matter of a few weeks after their meeting has taken place, the exercise becomes purely academic.

We need to see when people have been exerting influence at the same time as that influence may have had effect, not three or six months later. These would be very simple but very significant improvements. I hope that the Government, who have now created a more transparent system for meetings—the first time that any Government have attempted this—can see that this is the way to be more transparent still, and that surely is precisely what Parliament should be asking in the context of this legislation.

[Lord Mackay of Clashfern]

My Lords, I support what my noble friend just said. It seems rather silly to have done what is required in order to be transparent without taking the necessary steps to make it easy for other people to access that transparency. For example, ministerial diaries will be done on a daily basis, I assume, or possibly on a weekly basis, in advance, I hope, so the basic structure is there almost immediately. I cannot see why the diary cannot immediately be put out. Obviously, the diary sometimes has to be corrected, because even ministerial diaries sometimes do not actually transpire as intended, but an immediate correction could be made to make sure that it is accurate. I cannot see why it could not be done immediately, on a daily basis. Certainly, weekly would seem perfectly possible. If not, having made what one might regard as an important step towards transparency, the Government are losing the full benefit of that transparency by the difficulty that people have in accessing it.