House of Lords: Labour Peers’ Working Group Report
Lord Rooker Excerpts(9 years, 11 months ago)
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Lord Rooker (Lab)
My Lords, I congratulate my noble friends on the report and can support it. I want, however, to use my time to issue what I would call a manifesto warning to the three party leaders about Lords reform.
I served as a member of the Joint Committee on the 2011-12 draft Bill. I supported An Alternative Way Forward, a document supported by 13 of the 26 members of the committee. After we had finished our work, in scribbling around, I started to think about amendments for the Bill during the summer, before it was withdrawn. I came to the conclusion that I should try to get a package together. In short, it amounted to a combination of giving the Lords an extension of its revising powers, but limiting its blocking powers. I shall explain. As has been said, the Clegg Bill refused to look at functions and powers, instead concentrating exclusively on composition. His answer was that solutions would evolve. Indeed, the noble Lords, Lord Ashdown and Lord Strathclyde, went further and seemed to relish the prospect of open warfare between the two Houses. No one took them seriously, but no progress was made.
The two Houses are not equal. The unelected Lords cannot force legislation upon the elected Commons, but the Commons can force legislation upon the Lords. That is as it should be. Leaving things as they are and dealing only with composition will undermine the Commons. When he gave evidence to the Joint Committee, I asked the Deputy Prime Minister, whom I had never met, whether he was a man from the House of Commons or a House of Commons man. The look on his face told all. But he is not alone: none of the three party leaders down there is what I would consider a House of Commons man. Of Messrs Cameron, Clegg and Miliband, not one of them has ever been an effective, active, marauding, campaigning Back-Bencher in the Commons. There is not a shred of evidence to contradict that. They are open to the seduction of the manifesto claim to democratise the Lords from advisers less committed to the Commons than they are. The fact that the Commons can be so easily undermined appears to be of no concern whatever. Putting in place an elected element in whole or in part while leaving the current Lords powers the same is so risky it beggars belief they would try to do so.
There is then the primacy argument, used by some as a means of opposing the elected element. The question of whether it is incompatible to have Commons primacy with an elected Lords is legitimate but deceptive. The Lords’ current powers, unused by an unelected House, must be reduced. Why should people stand for election to a House that has fewer powers? Why should an elected second Chamber have fewer powers than an unelected second Chamber? In my view, that is the wrong way to look at it. We have to find a way to deal with this issue.
If we accept the second Chamber as a revising Chamber, a thinking-again Chamber, a holding-to-account Chamber and then give it a real task in these areas greater than at present, it becomes much easier to get your head around the idea of reducing powers—or, more correctly, restricting the blocking powers. I have not set about looking for lots of examples on this because there are plenty around to distinguish between them, but I will give a couple. The beauty of them is they would work with both an elected and an unelected Chamber. They should be promoted now, so that when the issue of election comes around—as it surely will—we will have removed some of the barriers to a decent consideration. It is logical to restrict Lords’ blocking powers, given the powers of the two Houses are not equal on finance or the formation of Government.
So far as revision is concerned, I am well aware that there are plenty of ideas around: there are some in the report we are debating. They do not need to be invented. For example, we could give the second Chamber the power to offer a couple of modest amendments to secondary legislation. The Parliament Act should not apply because secondary legislation is implementing legislation. This would give a boost to the revision of implementing legislation, while allowing the Government always to get their statutory instruments—at a price. We could allow the second Chamber revision of any money Bill that is not a finance Bill. That would stop the nonsense we had last year over the social security Bill, where we were prohibited from discussing what was general social policy. As I recall, there is a legal requirement for a finance Bill due to the Provisional Collection of Taxes Act, so it is quite easy to distinguish between a finance Bill and a money Bill.
As for blocking powers, we could remove the right of the Lords to vote on any Second Reading. It beggars belief that we would chuck out a Bill when we are here to revise it, so remove the power. Okay, we do not use the power, but if we leave it there for an elected House, just think about the potential for problems. If we give the second Chamber powers to amend SIs, I think we should remove the right to reject a statutory instrument in exchange, so there is a quid pro quo. We could propose to stop introducing Bills into the Lords, as was said by the report, or indeed to apply the Parliament Act to all such Bills—that is the other way round. We should certainly give up that power, which gives the possibility of Bills slipping through.
There should be a time limit on Bills taken in the second Chamber. We could introduce a fixed time in which to return to the Commons Bills that have undergone pre-legislative scrutiny. I still favour—I raised this before the last election—special attention being given to Common Bills passed under a timetable Motion. The second Chamber must have the power to carry out proper scrutiny of such Bills, which may or may not have undergone pre-legislative scrutiny, and it should have the power, perhaps by a majority two-thirds vote, to extend the time by a specified period if the Commons has not done its job properly. That would be a big incentive for the Commons to reform its processes as well.
I shall stop there, but I trust that I have given the House a flavour of giving this Chamber more revising powers while, at the same time, taking away some of its blocking powers. That could be done now. They are powers which, by and large, we do not use but they would be there to be used by an elected Chamber if there was no change. In my view, we have to secure the primacy argument before there is any elected element.
I suspect that on my final point I shall be in a minority. It is a point that I raised in the Joint Committee. In the event of there being an elected second Chamber, I would prefer the courts rather than the Government Whips’ Office to make use of the Parliament Act. In other words, there should be a procedure whereby, if no solution is found, the dispute goes to a special court. That would be a big incentive for both Houses to act in a grown-up way; otherwise, you keep the status quo of ping-pong. That sounds like a written constitution, does it not? That is the issue, as has already been said. I said to the Deputy Prime Minister that, if his Bill had become law, the UK would have been the only country with two elected Chambers but without a written constitution to deal with disputes. At one point in the debate, I got thrown back at me Israel and New Zealand, but they are unicameral; they do not have a written constitution and they have only one Chamber.
A sentence in a manifesto does not give the Government absolute power. That is my warning. I am not going to be prepared to vote for any change which undermines the House of Commons.
Public Services: Economic and Climatic Challenges
Lord Rooker Excerpts(10 years, 3 months ago)
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Lord Rooker
That this House takes note of the resilience of the United Kingdom in the face of economic and climatic challenges and pressures on public services.
Lord Rooker (Lab)
My Lords, I have not come to moan or blame climate change. While all the issues that I shall raise are not the fault of the coalition, they are not the fault of the previous Labour Government either. I shall not deal with threats or malicious actions, but concentrate on hazards, natural accidents policy et cetera. This is also an opportunity to thank emergency services personnel for their magnificent work so far this winter. The statutory services have delivered. Environment Agency staff deserve special thanks if for no other reason than that they do not normally get the recognition they deserve. Then there is the Royal National Lifeboat Institution, funded exclusively by the public so that Whitehall’s hands are not anywhere near it. It has been courageous in coastal waters and vital in the inland floods. I declare an interest as a governor member.
The Cabinet Office, which will answer this debate for the Government, has published each year since 2008 an unclassified version of the national risk assessment in the form of the National Risk Register of Civil Emergencies. It is an incredibly useful tool, though it does not cover all aspects of what I want to raise today, some of which includes the resilience of society at large in a social sense. I am also well aware from my time in government of the massive amount of planning and the exercises that take place to prepare for emergencies and test our resilience. The proof of proper planning and preparation preventing poor performance is the 2012 Olympics, but we seem in some ways to be scrimping along as a nation. That is a worry and why I want to raise these issues today.
On power supplies, the energy bosses from npower and EDF—as well as the former boss of Ofgem—spent a good deal of airtime in 2013 warning of power cuts due to lack of investment. National Grid’s Winter Outlook this winter says that the margins are tighter than we have ever seen. Ofgem says that if we get a 1-in-20 bad winter there will be real trouble as the risk of blackouts has tripled. Yet I opened the paper today only to see that E.ON is about to close one power station and run three others down—now, in the middle of winter. I accept that that is not all the fault of the coalition but it does not demonstrate the urgency that we need in this matter. The national risk register almost boasts that we have never had a total power outage—a point that it makes more than once. On gas storage, it remains the case that, unlike Italy, Germany and France, which can store between 59 and 87 days’ supply of gas, UK storage remains at 16 days. No action has been taken on that.
I also want to raise the issue of animal disease. We are only ever a phone call away from a vet in the field reporting a major outbreak. Heaven forbid that we have another foot and mouth outbreak, but we will at some point. The Parliamentary Office of Science and Technology’s POSTnote No. 392 tells us that measures for dealing with foot and mouth were exercised in 2011 under the codename “Silver Birch”. Do we have the vaccines at the ready and a willingness to use them, or, as was the case in 2001 and 2007, will industry be allowed to call the shots and avoid for a third time using vaccination? We dealt effectively with bluetongue in sheep and salmonella in poultry by vaccination. Are we ready for foot and mouth, as we were—as that POSTnote explains—in the exercises?
Last December, in a panic, the Department for Education made over £2 billion available for the rising school population. The children affected have all been born since the coalition formed—let us get that one out of the way. We are in a crisis where some local authorities will require 75% more places by 2015 than they had last September, and I would cite Norfolk, Thurrock and Croydon. Very substantial increases will be required in several other local authorities by 2016. Can we deliver on that? Local authorities are both a service delivery organisation for schools and a strategic education authority for an area. However, they can only extend local authority schools—they are not allowed to build or open any new schools and have no power to direct academies or free schools to open in a particular area. Who will spend the money on that? Surely we need a single capital pot for an area, irrespective of who runs the school. We are walking into a crisis affecting early years schooling. It is not too late to change that, but we cannot plan to have school places in the right locations quickly enough under the present system.
I do not have an issue with making local authorities and services more efficient, more accountable and better value for money—we are in desperate times—but with some councils it can appear that their own vested or narrow political interest is sometimes put above what the local citizens require. We have got to the point where the cuts now threaten key services—that has not really started yet. Street cleaning, adult social care, children’s services and the arts and libraries are all for the massive chop. Those areas affect our public, physical and mental health. We need the arts and libraries just the same. Much council spending is invisible to the population because most people do not actually use the services and only the vulnerable will feel the impact. For most people, when the services collapse what they see is the rubbish uncollected in the street. Then it comes home to them that someone from the local authority should have dealt with it. There is a problem of visibility there.
I am sure that some noble Lords will raise NHS issues in this debate. I do not intend to go down that road but observe that we are in a national obesity crisis. Yet my question to the Minister is: are we prepared for the increase in malnutrition among young children? That is an inevitable consequence of attacking the poor, both those in and those out of work. We know that Ministers do not like food banks, which makes matters even worse; yet the food banks are now under such pressure that they have to supply cold boxes and kettle boxes for those who cannot afford to use gas or electricity to cook food. There is also some evidence—I do not have the details of this as I heard it vaguely only yesterday—that more people are shopping day to day for food. The supermarkets can track this very tightly in urban areas. That means that if there is interruption from either power or transport our resilience as regards food may not be as good as in the past.
I also want to raise with the Government the issue of science laboratory capacity. I hope that somebody is doing something about it. We actually had a laboratory close at the height of the horsemeat scandal last March and many laboratory tests had to be sent out of the UK to other countries. Our laboratories are the ultimate mixture of academic, private, independent and local authority, and they are a vital UK strategic national asset. In my view, the Government’s chief scientist should lead on this. We need the laboratories for regulation and investigation as well as for the assurances required by industry for all kinds of events—that is, food, human and animal events as well as chemical, nuclear and biological threat events, which I will not raise today. We are on the edge of a real capacity problem as regards laboratories and the numbers of public analysts. The president of the Association of Public Analysts, Liz Moran, has on more than one occasion told parliamentary committees that we are in serious trouble in terms of our capacity. There were 41 analysts in 2007. There are 29 currently and that is due to go down to 28. That is a real problem for consumer and citizen protection, which will be the loser. It is a serious issue and has to be treated nationally.
Housing policy has never been politically sexy, at least not since the time of Harold Macmillan. That applies as much to my own party as to others, and I speak as someone who carried the portfolio for some years in opposition and briefly in government. There is no sense of a national plan. Demand is up due to the open borders demanded by the CBI and others to help keep wages down. Yet supply is so small that the inevitable happens: mobility ceases, debt for individuals goes sky high and we spend billions of pounds supporting landlords’ lifestyles rather than adding to stocks of bricks and mortar. The nearest we ever got to a plan in recent years was the communities plan published by my noble friend Lord Prescott in 2003. The successors of both parties seem to have got quite bored in delivering that.
The coalition appears to be at a complete loss about this major national, regional and intergenerational housing crisis, with millions of hidden homeless people in addition to those on the street. Land is not a problem. Some 1% to 2% of land plus the brownfield sites would solve our problems for 20 years. The reasoning is simple. Urban developments at present amount to about 11% of the land, national parks to 8%, areas of outstanding national beauty to 16% and the green belt to 14%. That adds up to 49%, so over 50% is available to take the 1% to 1.5% that we need to solve our problem. That is simple. Without building on any of the areas I have just touched on, enough land is available. Yet the best summing up of this I have found was a sentence in a very old essay:
“Democratic governments drift along the line of least resistance, taking short views, paying their way with sops and doles, and smoothing their path with pleasant-sounding platitudes”.
That describes the coalition’s housing policy but it was actually a sentence from the seminal 1931 essay by Winston Churchill in the Strand Magazine.
Weather events happen with or without climate change, let us be clear about that. The national risk register covers the lot. Two years ago, drought was a key crisis. We have to think about the serious volatility of changes in climate. The Thames barrier has a limited life. I had already put this in my notes, and I was really worried when I heard yesterday about the delay. The Thames barrier is sinking, and we are going to wait until 2070 before we start having a look at it. Flood defences are more than walls and dams: they should be environmental as well. I commend to the Government—I am sure that someone has read it—the major article by George Monbiot last week. It appeared first on Tuesday in the Guardian and then on two pages in the Mail on Sunday. True, the latter newspaper used it to attack the EU but the article was the same in both. George Monbiot highlighted the methods for preventing floods that UK scientists have being using for years in the tropics—planting trees in the hills to save and protect communities down stream from flooding. Here, we pay farmers to grub up trees and hedges and plant the hills with pretty grass and use sheep to maintain the chocolate box image, and then we wonder why we have floods where we should not really have them and which we could prevent if we took the advice. Monbiot says that water sinks into soil under trees at 67 times the rate that it sinks in under grass, so why are we not doing that in the UK in areas that we know flood unnecessarily?
My last point on floods is to express concern that the plan for sustainable insurance known “Flood Re” has again been delayed. I will not go into detail but the Swiss Re system for terrorism insurance has worked incredibly well, and I do not see why it cannot work for major floods. It could work for major animal disease outbreaks. The taxpayer is protected because the system allows a market in terrorism insurance to operate. If it is a good enough system to cover buildings in the City of London for terror attacks, the principle should be good enough to ensure that insurance is available for householders in major floods. The pool system works at all times except the most catastrophic, which is when the Treasury stands behind the pool. It is cheaper for the taxpayer in the long run.
Did I just mention the Treasury? I think for social resilience we have a problem with the Treasury. Resilience is the process of being able to return to the original state after being deformed, but we know that the Chancellor wants a smaller state. He wants to cut the public sector by making what he calls hard choices. His hard choices are the ones he finds easy to make, and are only hard on those affected who, in the main, are the weak and disadvantaged. His hard choices are to diminish local authorities, set the old against the young and not even talk about doing it in a fairer way. The young do not vote. Their turnout is two-thirds the rate of the rest, so if they do not vote and threaten him at the ballot box, why should he bother? I do not like this approach, to be honest. One reason is the seeming total lack of compassion and comprehension. It is not nice.
I looked around to try to explain the Chancellor’s approach to creating intergenerational conflict and a breakdown in general of the resilience of society, and I chose Donald Rumsfeld. We are all familiar with Rumsfeld’s quote from 2002 about the three categories of the known knowns, the known unknowns and the unknown unknowns. He did not invent them—they had been around for a while—but there is a fourth category highlighted by a psychoanalytical philosopher who I am greatly familiar with, Slavoj Žižek: the unknown known, or that which we intentionally refuse to acknowledge that we know. That is a perfect fit for the Chancellor. He knows what he is doing but refuses to acknowledge it and its consequences.
I was looking around, thinking about what would be a good example of this to finish on, and I found it on the front page of today’s Telegraph, which quotes the police:
“Documents disclosed by the Association of Chief Police Officers show plans have been drawn up for the cannon to be used …Police warn they expect water cannon will be required because ‘the ongoing and potential future of austerity measures are likely to lead to continued protest’”.
If the Government are in discussions with the Home Office preparing for problems on the streets because of austerity and they are preparing to be resilient against those who protest, why can they not prepare for all the other issues I have raised today?
Lord Rooker
My Lords, I thank everybody who participated in the debate. I will make two points incredibly briefly. First, when the Minister read out the list of things that he looked at when he came into office, I was reminded of the 1931 essay by Churchill that I quoted from, “Fifty Years Hence”. It is almost a modern-day version of that essay. Secondly, I will give him a new risk that I did not raise before, one that comes out of something said by the noble Viscount, Lord Ridley. I was at the launch last week by the Crop Protection Association—which he mentioned—of a new campaign against illegal pesticides. The association estimates that currently between 7% and 10% of pesticides entering Europe are illegal and that most of them start off in China. We could be more damaged by those because they could poison our land if misused. That is another risk to be going on with that needs to be added to the list. I thank everyone for participating in the debate. It has been exactly as intended—wide-ranging, in the sense that my noble friend Lord Touhig said.
Health: Birth Defects
Lord Rooker Excerpts(10 years, 6 months ago)
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Lord Rooker
To ask Her Majesty’s Government what assessment they have made of the impact of fortifying white flour with folic acid on the number of pregnancies affected by neural tube defects.
Lord Rooker (Lab)
My Lords, I am very pleased to have the opportunity to raise the subject of fortifying white flour with folic acid in the interests of public health.
Deficiencies in folic acid have been found to lead to neural tube birth defects, including spina bifida and hydrocephalus. It is both a national and an international issue. Public health policy has been to encourage those planning to become pregnant to ensure a voluntary input of folates, either by supplement or by folate-rich foods, in that crucial period covering conception and the first 12 weeks. However, this policy is known to fall on deaf ears in some socioeconomic groups, and does not cover the issue of unplanned or unintended pregnancies. In some countries, where bread is part of the staple diet, it has been found that fortifying bread flour with folic acid can cover both the issues of the target group and unplanned pregnancy.
Bread has been a staple food in the UK for centuries. Consumption has fallen a little but it still contains more than 10% of our daily intake of key nutrients and remains a major source of them. Since the 1940s, just after the war, most of our bread flour has been fortified with four added nutrients, and that is still the case today. On 5 August this year, at the start of the Recess, Defra announced the result of the consultation on the bread and flour regulations, which was that the mandatory fortification of flour will continue on health and scientific grounds.
The idea of folic acid fortification has been around for many years. I can confirm from my own personal experience that in 1999, as Minister for food safety—before my Food Standards Agency days—I was lobbied on the issue by a leading scientist during a journey to a food conference. My initial reaction was, “It’s mass medication”. But I soon realised it was not then, and it is not now. By 2007, Her Majesty’s Government had been advised by the independent Scientific Advisory Committee on Nutrition and the Food Standards Agency to go down the route of mandatory fortification. This advice was reinforced in 2009-10, during my term as chair of the Food Standards Agency.
Scientists involved in the research, such as Professor Nicholas Wald of the Wolfson Institute of Preventive Medicine, have chased the issue up over the years. Others, such as Professor Colin Blakemore, have raised more generally the issue of the lack of feedback from government on advice from scientists, where there seems to be no clear decision on policy or action to be taken, or not taken, on the basis of the advice. He cited folic fortification as a recent example.
Delay has been caused by some scientific doubts regarding the effect of too much folate in the diet, which might be the cause of some rare cancers. Justifiably, Ministers and Chief Medical Officers required reassurance on this aspect. I believe—and this is why I am raising the issue now, after leaving the FSA—that the publication in March this year of the paper by Vollset et al in the Lancet puts the concerns to rest. The study analysed data on 49,621 individuals in 13 evenly randomised trials and found that there was no significant effect of folic acid supplementation on the incidence of cancer of the large intestine, prostate, lung, breast or any specific site. Furthermore, in interpretation, the scientists pointed out that the fortification of flour and cereal products involves doses of folic acid that are on average an order of magnitude smaller than the doses used in the trials they examined.
On 1 July the noble Earl, Lord Howe, the Health Minister for England, told Parliament that Ministers were “taking stock”. Has that included talking to Ministers in the other three countries of the UK? More than 50 countries are fortifying flour with folic acid, including the United States, Canada, Iran, Argentina and South Africa. So far, none in Europe are, due to the concerns I have mentioned, which are no longer justified.
Australia introduced mandatory folic fortification in September 2009. It has been found, in a paper by Brown et al in the Medical Journal of Australia in January 2011, that,
“the introduction of mandatory fortification with folic acid has significantly reduced the prevalence of folate deficiency in Australia, including in woman of childbearing age”.
A study in the American Journal of Medical Genetics in 2010 found that food fortification with folic acid prevents neural tube defects but not other types of congenital abnormalities. The study covered more than 3 million births in Chile, Argentina and Brazil over a 25-year period, according to the authors, Lopez-Camelo et al. The paper by Blencowe et al in 2010 in the International Journal of Epidemiology concluded:
“The evidence supports both folic acid supplementation and fortification as effective in reducing neonatal mortality from NTDs”.
So it works.
The latest study, published earlier in the year in the Lancet, clears the way to vastly improve the health position in the UK. We start from a low position. England has the highest rate of unintended or unplanned pregnancies after the USA—well in excess of 200,000. As such, the women concerned will see no need for supplementation. So far as the pregnancies that are affected by neural tube defects are concerned, there are hidden and avoidable family tragedies involved.
The best figures I have—they are a little old but I am advised they are the best—are those used by SACN, the Scientific Advisory Committee on Nutrition, in its report, drawn to my attention by the Shine charity. In England and Wales, there were 178 neural tube defect-affected births from 853 neural tube defect-affected pregnancies. That means that there were 675 terminations. In Northern Ireland, there were 11 affected births and no terminations. In Scotland, there were 49 affected pregnancies with 50% terminations. That means that there were more or less 238 neural tube defect-affected births and 913 affected pregnancies, with around 700 terminations. These will be late, following the 20-week scan, when neural tube defects show. In summary, therefore, there are 150 to 200 babies born with neural tube defects leading to spina bifida and other conditions, with a total of 750 to 1,000 pregnancies. Eighty per cent of the neural tube defect-affected pregnancies are terminated.
Nothing I say diminishes my life-long support for a woman's right to chose, but it is self-evident that decisions for termination based on neural tube defect-affected pregnancies would decline with folate increases. More than one in 1,000 pregnancies in the UK is affected each year. Folic fortification has been shown in the countries that have a mandatory policy to have prevented between 27% and 50% of cases of neural tube defects. Based on these figures, we have a potential to save 100-plus neural tube defect-affected births per year in UK; and significantly we could prevent hundreds of late terminations every year. Putting it crudely, the current reduction in the number of babies born with neural tube defects is actually brought about by the termination of pregnancies. I do not like the idea that in the past some DoH officials have claimed that NTD is well managed.
The Prime Minister said at PMQs on 27 February that,
“conditions such as spina bifida have come down and that folic acid has an important role to play”.—[Official Report, Commons, 27/2/13; col. 311.]
They have “come down” as terminations go up, due to the rate of diagnosis getting more accurate. What we need is primary prevention. Putting folic acid in white bread flour is not mass medication. Those who wish to avoid it just avoid white sliced bread. It gets to the groups of women most difficult to get to.
I want to hear what assessment the Government have made of the impact over the past seven months while they have been taking stock of the operation in England and what discussions have taken place with the devolved Administrations and their Chief Medical Officers. It is better to have a UK solution, as I know that flour mills are not always in the most convenient locations for four separate policies.
The science policy advice to government is to do it. Scientific concerns have been raised and cleared. It is not mass medication; it saves lives and misery, and it saves money. It reduces the hidden cost of the present policy, namely the costs of terminations as a management tool. It produces more healthy babies and improves public health.
Lord Wallace of Saltaire (LD)
My Lords, one speaker has scratched. That will allow us to stretch speaking times from seven to nine minutes, provided that the next four speakers all observe that when 9 comes up on the clock, they stop.
Baroness Jolly (LD)
I am grateful to the noble Lord for securing this debate on this very important issue, and I thank all noble Lords for this thoughtful and informative debate. The department is considering this issue very seriously. We know that approximately one in every 1,000 pregnancies is affected by a neural tube defect, which can result in miscarriage, neonatal death or lifelong disability. We also know that poor folate status is an established cause of neural tube defect-affected pregnancies, and therefore how important folic acid is for women of childbearing age. I will take your Lordships briefly through the detail of how the Government are currently taking action to reduce the risk of women having insufficient levels of folate—a risk that may result in potential neural tube defects such as spina bifida in unborn children.
It is possible to get all the folate you need from food in a healthy diet, but for women who are trying to conceive or are newly pregnant, getting enough particularly matters. That is why, since the 1990s, the Department of Health has advised women who can become pregnant to take folic acid supplements before conception and for the first 12 weeks of pregnancy, and to increase their intake of folate-rich foods. That advice is promoted as strongly as possible through all the channels we use to communicate with women and health professionals. NICE guidance ensures that health professionals are equipped with comprehensive advice on folic acid and on action to take with women who may become pregnant.
For women, advice is disseminated through a variety of sources such as the NHS Choices website, which sets out why folic acid is important for pregnancy and gives guidance on taking supplements. The Department of Health also provides funds to the charity Tommy’s to produce The Young Woman’s Guide to Pregnancy, which advises young women to take folic acid. Start4Life, a campaign to give the best start in life to nought to two year-olds, gives information on five key healthy behaviours during pregnancy, one of which is taking folic acid and vitamin D supplements. Their leaflets are written in a friendly and accessible style and are very popular with healthcare professionals as a tool to facilitate conversation with parents and expectant parents. The NHS Information Service for Patients offers to send e-mails and texts to women and their partners in the fifth week of pregnancy to remind women to take their folic acid.
Folic acid supplements are widely available and cost as little as £1 for a month’s supply, but are also available on NHS prescription. Pregnant women and women who have had a child in the previous 12 months are exempt from prescription charges, as are people on certain benefits or those who qualify through the NHS low-income scheme. We also offer free vitamin supplements containing folic acid without an NHS prescription to pregnant women and new mothers in very low-income families throughout the UK who are supported by the Healthy Start scheme. More than 150,000 pregnant women and new mothers are eligible to claim vitamins through that scheme. However, we know that some women do not take supplements, and of those that do, some start too late. That is of real concern to the Government and health professionals, and an area on which the Chief Medical Officer is keen to see action, as she set out in her recent annual report.
In 2000 the Committee on Medical Aspects of Food Policy first recommended the fortification of flour with folic acid to reduce the risk of NTD-affected births. Your Lordships will be familiar with the developments of the scientific advice since then. The Government are very grateful for the full advice which has been provided by consecutive expert committees and for the rigour and scrutiny with which the Scientific Advisory Committee on Nutrition—better known as SACN—considered the issue for its report in 2006 and its subsequent reviews of evidence. The noble Lord, Lord Rooker, will know that SACN sought to understand and clarify the risks of fortification carefully as it sought to make clear the benefits of its recommendation.
The advisory committee concluded in 2006 that mandatory fortification of flour with folic acid would reduce the risk of NTD-affected pregnancies, but that there was a potential risk to some population groups, particularly older people, including a potential increased risk of bowel cancer. In 2007, the then CMO asked SACN to further consider the evidence in this regard. In 2009, SACN’s majority view was that the new evidence did not provide a substantial basis for changing the original recommendation. However, it recommended fortification only if accompanied by a number of other actions, including restricting voluntary fortification of foods with folic acid, developing guidance on supplement use for particular population groups, and implementing measures to monitor evidence of long-term exposure to intakes of folic acid above the guideline upper limit per day.
SACN’s recommendation about monitoring and review explicitly reflected concerns around the potential for the numbers of people consuming levels of folic acid above the guideline upper limit. Health Ministers considered it prudent to ensure that all available evidence on the risk of colon cancer was peer-reviewed and in the public domain, which noble Lords referred to earlier, and the evidence was published in the Lancet this January. Following publication, Ministers confirmed earlier this year that they were taking stock of the issue. I assure the noble Lord who, as former chair of the Food Standards Agency, will understand this better than many, that because of the complexity of the issue it is essential that we weigh up carefully the risks and benefits in coming to a decision, and that we fully think through the implications of the other recommendations made by SACN. We are now doing that, and, thanks to the expert scientific committees and the consideration of this by the FSA and others, there is a wide range of evidence and advice to consider.
I pay tribute to the work of the voluntary sector, and in particular to one organisation mentioned earlier in this debate, Shine, which supports individuals and families as they face the challenges arising from spina bifida. It works tirelessly to raise awareness of the importance of folic acid and in May this year held the first ever national Folic Awareness Day.
Noble Lords have asked many questions, and I will work through them in the time I have available. However, if there are any still outstanding I will be happy to write to noble Lords after the debate. The noble Lord, Lord Rooker, asked whether we had talked to Ministers in Scotland, Wales and Northern Ireland. As noble Lords are aware, food and health policies are devolved issues and discussions on fortification outside England are for those Administrations. However, the views of those authorities will be taken into consideration by Ministers.
Lord Rooker
I am sorry to interrupt, but this dismissal of devolution is symptomatic of Westminster; it just does not do devolution. Rather than simply saying that it is a matter for them, it would be better to have a UK-wide policy. Is the Minister admitting that Ministers in England—this is what we are talking about here—have not discussed the matter with Ministers in Scotland, who may take their own route, as they are free to do, and that the four chief medical offices have not discussed the issue among themselves?
Baroness Jolly
My Lords, I am telling noble Lords what I have been briefed. I am more than happy to write to noble Lords and, if they are happy for me to do so, leave the letter in the Library for everyone to check. I will also need to respond to the noble Lord, Lord Rooker, on his question regarding terminations.
The noble Countess, Lady Mar, asked about the risks and benefits, and assessing impacts, of fortification, giving due consideration to the implications of additional recommendations by SACN. We will take into account the views of the Chief Medical Officer, who raised the issue in her annual report, and of the devolved Administrations. The other point raised by the noble Countess was on ensuring that NTDs are avoided in pregnancy and on preventing vitamin B12 masking. We need to get this right. SACN considered the amount of folic acid to recommend and also recommended developing guidance on supplement use for particular population groups, along with implementing measures to monitor evidence of long-term exposure to intakes of folic acid. We are carefully weighing the benefits and risks of SACN’s recommendations and will take account of all views.
The noble Baroness, Lady Grey-Thompson, asked what foods would be considered for fortification. Currently, breakfast cereals are voluntarily fortified with folic acid in the UK. The FSA considered other foods, including soft drinks, fruit juice, milk and chewing gum, when it made that recommendation, but the consumption rate of these products is not considered to be universal across women of child-bearing age and would therefore not be suitable for fortification. Other foods were also considered. Bread was finally decided upon as the universal food as—to answer a point raised by both noble Baronesses—it is universally consumed across the population and all socioeconomic groups: more than 90% of households eat bread. Fortification of wheat flour would also include other wheat-based products such as pizzas, pastries and biscuits.
I think I have replied to several points that were raised.
Transparency of Lobbying, Non-Party Campaigning and Trade Union Administration Bill
Lord Rooker Excerpts(10 years, 6 months ago)
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Lord Rooker (Lab)
My Lords, I shall speak to Amendments 23, some of whose content has been covered, and 26. Before I do so, however, I would like to jump back for a moment because I was reluctant to intervene on the welcome statement that the Minister made at the beginning of our proceedings. I hope that when he comes forward tomorrow with the timetable, Part 4 will actually still be Part 4—that is, after we have finished Parts 1, 2 and 3. It is no good doing Parts 1, 3 and 4 and then trying to fix in Part 2. Part 4, on commencement and everything else, has to come at the end and remain as the final part of the Bill. I hope that that will be the order that we will get tomorrow.
I shall share this with the Committee: I have made a bit of a list, although I agree, frankly, that the route taken by the noble Lord, Lord Norton of Louth is much more satisfactory. Like my noble friend Lord Campbell-Savours, I am amending what is on offer; I am not trying to rewrite the Bill. It is fairly obvious that a Minister of the Crown has to be covered, and it is an open-and-shut case that special advisers should be covered.
What the noble and learned Lord, Lord Hardie, has just said about Parliamentary Private Secretaries is absolutely true. To be honest, I had an effective PPS only for my first four years as Minister when I was in the other place; to have a Lords Minister with a Commons PPS is a complete waste of time—not much help at all. Nevertheless, the PPS that I had for two years in MAFF and then for two years at the DSS—the same person—did not attend all meetings but certainly once or twice a week was sitting around a table with officials and myself and other Ministers, along with the Secretary of State’s PPS. That was normal; there was nothing suspicious about it. It worked perfectly okay. It was very useful. That person therefore has to be covered by such legislation, not in their role as a constituency Member of Parliament but in their role as a minor functionary in the Government. They can be dismissed by the Prime Minister or indeed appointed with the Prime Minister’s permission. Effectively, for practical purposes, those decisions are made by the Chief Whip but it is the same thing: the head of the Government sanctions these appointments and dismissals—as I found out to my cost when I got sacked as a PPS in 1977. I had voted the wrong way on a Bill. So PPSs have to be covered, and the Government have covered Permanent Secretaries.
I come to the issue of non-ministerial government departments. On the latest count that I have, there are 23 ministerial government departments and 21 non-ministerial departments. One thing that is unique about them compared with the non-departmental public bodies and executive agencies—it is a cast-iron cert—is that they are all separately funded by the Treasury. They are government departments. They do not have a parental department. When one looks at the Cabinet Office list on the web for November last year, they are all listed. For executive agencies, the list gives the parent department. For non-ministerial departments, there is no parent department but a post-box department that answers PQs and debates. It has no role whatever in policy and no authority. Most non-ministerial departments are set up by primary legislation. They have their own Act of Parliament to set them up—obviously, I declare an interest, having just done four years as chair of the Food Standards Agency.
Let us take the first one on the list: the Charity Commission for England and Wales. It is the independent regulator of charitable activity. In the advert for a new chief executive that I saw at the weekend—I am not quite sure what has happened there because I thought the former chief executive was reappointed in August—the word “independent” is used. Non-ministerial departments are set up to give them a degree of independence. In fact, most members of the public do not know that they are government departments. That is the benefit. They are genuinely treated as independent regulators. Half the food industry does not understand that the Food Standards Agency is a copper-bottomed, 100% central government department, but it operates under its own legislation as the independent regulator for the sector. It answers to Parliament, like all government departments, and all the staff are civil servants, as in all these 21 non-ministerial departments.
Although there are 21 non-ministerial departments, only one is covered in the legislation: HM Revenue and Customs. The reason is that it is the only one of the 21 where the chief exec is a Perm-Sec-status civil servant. In all the others, the chief executives are either directors-general or in some cases, directors, who are very senior civil servants, but not at the top. There is a difference in their status. The one exception is HMRC, where there is a Perm Sec, and that is covered in Schedule 1.
Non-ministerial departments are set up in the way they are to keep them away from the sticky fingers of Ministers on a day-to-day basis. I know it looks like Topsy, and it is a very unsatisfactory arrangement with the hierarchy of different bodies, but each one was set up for a reason: to keep Ministers away from the day-to-day activity. That is obviously the case in Customs and regulating charities and, certainly, in food. Not having Ministers involved in the day-to-day working on a hunch has been a big success. That is the reason for setting them up as freestanding and funded by the Treasury, unlike executive agencies or non-departmental public bodies. They are quite different, but they are central government departments and are all staffed by civil servants, and the heads, including the chairs of boards—I will come to that in a moment—are all approved on appointment by the Prime Minister, after they have gone right through the interview process with Civil Service commissioners. They are government departments for all practical purposes, but they do not have a Minister walking the floors day to day. Ministers do not like it because they do not have any policy levers over these government departments, but they answer PQs and debates, and it is a very satisfactory and British way of dealing with an issue.
So are they subject to lobbying? Ha! You only have to look at the list. Of course they are subject to lobbying. Who is subject to lobbying? The chief execs are. So far as I know, they all have governance boards with a chair to deal with the governance aspects and they are all non-execs. I have not gone into that, but I think most of the boards are completely non-exec. In the case of the Food Standards Agency, it certainly is, and long may it remain so.
The question is whether they are subject to lobbying as government departments. They are operating, by the way, without phone calls from the Perm Sec or Minister of another department. They are told that it is a no-go area: “Take your tanks off my lawn. The legislation says that I am responsible for this policy. We, as the agency”—it may be a regulator; most of them are, but there are other functions—“are responsible under the law for these areas of policy”. Ministers therefore do not have a role. They do not sit around the table deciding on the policies. The agencies and non-ministerial departments do that, and the board deals with the strategy and governance, so you can bet your bottom dollar that the chairs and chief execs are subject to lobbying and, as such, should be treated in the same way as the Government say that Ministers and Perm Secs should. It naturally follows.
The other matter I listed was that of a chief scientific officer to a government department. The Government’s Chief Scientific Adviser is of course listed in Schedule 1. That is not good enough. They are incredibly influential in the departments. By definition, they are all now part time; that was part of the change some years ago to have all the chief scientists out in the real world. They have got to have a chair somewhere or be part of another organisation, and give three to four days to the department. That is certainly the case with Defra and the Food Standards Agency, as was. That was laid down: they would have another role and be tied to academia or outside science. Are they subject to lobbying? You can bet your bottom dollar they are. Should they be covered? Most certainly. They should be covered for their own protection. It is not a question of saying that they cannot be trusted, but these bodies are independent and this applies to all government departments, whether they are ministerial or non-ministerial.
I do not want to labour this—I think I have made the point—but my other point relates to Clause 26. With the charities part of the legislation, we have this new rule of one year before the date of the fixed-term election; now we have that fixed date you can do things that you could not do before. Different rules will come in. Well, frankly, the salaried leader of the Opposition and the financially publicly supported members of a shadow Cabinet, six months before the election—and they could be the Government after those six months—ought to be covered. There ought to be some kind of rule which includes the Opposition for their protection. Again, I am not casting aspersions; it is for their protection. The reality is that all kinds of accusations will be made during the election period. First, Ministers will be publishing their diaries and all that during the election. There are bound to be some people causing trouble, asking questions and things like that. Within that final six months, the official Opposition, salaried out of public finds, trying to be the Government, ought to be covered. That is a crucial period. I have not discussed this with anybody, by the way; I just came up with a bit of lateral thinking the other day.
If the Government are genuine about the transparency of the lobbying they have to cover as many arms of government as they realistically can. I deliberately did not include every single civil servant—the bottle washers, cooks, cleaners, engineers and whatever. That would be going too far and would be impractical. We need a tight list that could be practical and both understood and accepted by the lobbying fraternity, government, customers outside government and the staff concerned. The staff would want to be involved because it is about their protection. All kinds of allegations would be bandied about when things go wrong. It is much better if you can always say, “We are open and transparent”. The greatest protection people have is openness and transparency. Most of the press do not read the open and transparent stuff until something goes wrong. Then they make all sorts of accusations, saying that they have discovered this, that and the other, while things were already there, open and transparent. However, that means that you do not get the full scare stories of the press or the leaks, and openness is a good idea. In this case that ought to be shared by the Opposition. It would obviously be to a limited extent, because they do not issue contracts. All kinds of lobbying activities will go on, and it will be useful for everyone else to know who was being lobbied, who was doing the lobbying, and what they were lobbying about.
Lord Wallace of Saltaire
Both of those services were as opposed to the military service—and I am not sure that I would think of the noble Lord, Lord Kerr, as particularly military.
The noble Lord, Lord Aberdare, asked who needed to know. It is not Ministers who need to know primarily. Transparency is about the public being better informed, and campaigning groups and civil society organisations making the information easy to obtain.
The noble Lord, Lord Rooker, said that perhaps if the information was easier to obtain we would not have newspapers any longer claiming that they had discovered such and such. As I listened to him, I recollected that yesterday in the Daily Mail, I think that I read the same “We have discovered” story for about the third time in about four years. Newspapers have a tendency to claim that they have discovered something that was all there already. Indeed, many years ago when I criticised the financial services industry in the Channel Islands, the local press announced that it had discovered that I was a French spy. Its evidence for this—that my wife and I had both been decorated by the French Government—came from that deeply obscure publication, Who’s Who. I am sure the press will go on “discovering” things that could already have been found out easily. Again, that is the way the press behave.
As I have listened to this debate, I have been thinking about the debate we had in the Cabinet Office about the mistake previous Governments made in going for really grandiose IT projects, trying to put absolutely everything into what they were doing and eventually coming unstuck. The Cabinet Office has now decided that incremental change in IT is easier to control. If we are moving towards transparency we have to be careful that we do not say we want absolutely everyone to be included. The best can be the enemy of the good here. The first target is lobbyists rather than every single representative of government that they meet in all circumstances. The definition of who they meet in government was adopted as “those within government who now have to publish their diaries: their lists of whom they meet”.
Amendment 3 from the noble Lord, Lord Campbell-Savours, in many ways stands on its own. We need to think about it in a different context from the others here. Other amendments extend the register to parliamentarians, Ministers, Permanent Secretaries, other civil servants, special advisers, all Members and staff of Parliament, all non-ministerial departments, parliamentary private secretaries and so on. We are talking about, I suspect, between 15,000 and 20,000 people. There are 5,000 members of the senior Civil Service—Permanent Secretaries, directors general, directors and deputy directors. The figure in my head for the number who work in Parliament is more than 6,000, and then we have to include non-ministerial departments. How fast and how far we go certainly needs to be considered.
Lord Rooker
There is an organisation in the Civil Service that they all want to belong to—the Top 200. It is an official classification. The figure the Minister has just given for the kind of people who will be covered as the decision-makers and opinion formers is preposterous. I am not saying it is limited to 200, but within the Civil Service being a member of the Top 200 means you are there. It is not just the Permanent Secretaries but the directors general as well. You are not talking about thousands. They are the chief executives of some of the departments I referred to.
Lord Wallace of Saltaire
I take that. I was about to say that the issue of proportionality—how far we go—is a really difficult one here. However, if one is talking about who gives you access to a Minister perhaps we need to include diary secretaries for example. Who we include and who we do not is itself a matter of some difficulty.
Lord Rooker
Lord Rooker
My Lords, I have a few probing amendments in this group: Amendments 10, 12, 15, 30 and 51. I am not in any way criticising the Minister here, as we are in Committee and the idea is to get some detailed answers to some of these issues so that we can decide whether or not there are issues of substance to come back to on Report. I hope he will feel free to give us some detailed responses to some of the points being raised as, otherwise, we will not get the benefit of Committee stage. It was always planned that Report would be after Christmas anyway—there is no change there, as I understand it—and this is important.
Amendment 10 says,
“leave out ‘and in return for payment’”.
I want to know what happens if the lobbyist is acting for free. What is the situation when they are not doing it for payment? There might be ways of people organising their affairs such that they can undertake lobbying but not actually get paid for it. I want to know what the effect would be of removing the words “in return for payment”.
Amendment 12 has a degree of substance. I have not brought it with me, because I do not want to make big speeches in Committee, but this is based on paragraphs 18 and 19 of the report from Graham Allen’s constitutional reform committee in the other place. The reality of life is that lobbyists, in return for payment, provide professional advice on how to lobby but do not lobby themselves. That is, to a great extent, the evidence that was given to the Select Committee in the other place about the way that professional lobbyists work. They go to a company and say, “You have a problem and this is the way to solve it: deal with it this way and approach these people. Do it all yourself and we will guide you through”. That is perfectly respectable—I am not criticising it in any way—but it is not covered by the Bill. The industry itself says that is the main way that it works. There has to be a response to that. I did not follow the details in the other place but the Select Committee report criticised the Bill as an object lesson in how not to legislate. This is an important point.
Lord Campbell-Savours
I have pondered this myself. I wonder what interest it really is anyhow of anybody what a lobbyist advises a client. Why is there a need to register that person? If he is simply advising his client as to what to do, why should that original lobbyist register?
Lord Rooker
The point behind this is that the Bill is addressing an issue that does not really arise. The vast majority of the work that takes place is lobbyists training and advising others how to do their own lobbying. They will not get caught by this. The reality is that the Bill will not cover anybody. The numbers are going down all the while. We will end up with a register with nobody on it; there will be no fees to run the register. I am not criticising this; it is a perfectly respectable way to work. I do not want to criticise people who train others how to lobby; it is a bit like training others how to legislate. But that is what the industry told the Select Committee in the other place about how the industry works. This Bill is a complete waste of time and does not address the issues the Government set out to address. That is what is behind Amendment 12, simply the way it works.
Lord Wallace of Saltaire
My Lords, the political process flows through a whole series of meetings. Capturing every single dimension of the political process may be beyond the wit of man or woman to achieve. We are looking here at making lobbying more transparent and capturing the main actors involved. The Bill specifically includes the lobbying of Ministers wherever they are: in London, Brussels or Washington. How far down the chain of officials we go, outside the United Kingdom as well as inside it, is a matter that we need to consider under the issue of proportionality and how far we think we need to cover absolutely everything.
Perhaps I may turn to Amendment 30, in the name of the noble Lord, Lord Rooker, which is on note-taking. Perhaps recording rather than note-taking is what we might now be considering. As the noble Lord said, the question of how far one can legislate for good practice under all circumstances is very difficult but, again, I will take that back and discuss the matter further with him.
The noble Lord’s Amendment 51 takes us back to the definition of directly employed lobbyists versus consultant lobbyists. As I said on a previous grouping, Part 1 is intended to deal fundamentally with consultant lobbyists—lobbyists for hire—rather than those directly employed in the public affairs departments of multinational companies. From my own experience, perhaps I may say that companies and banks based in London often operate directly with government and we know who they are. Consultant lobbyists are often representing companies based abroad, foreign Governments or others who are not used to knowing how the British political system works. That is one reason why they come to consultant lobbyists, who are specialists. They advise them and then often lobby for them. That is part of what we want to catch in a globalised political system where non-British actors, so to speak, are taking an active part in our political process.
Having, I hope, answered some of the points raised and repeated that I am open to further conversations off the Floor with those who have tabled these amendments, I invite the noble Lord to withdraw his amendment.
Lord Rooker
My Lords, I thank the Minister very much for his response. What the noble Lord, Lord Kerr, said in his intervention regarding Brussels is absolutely right. It so happens that about 95% of the legislation affecting food in this country, and which is implemented by the government department—the Food Standards Agency—is actually European. It starts in Brussels. At the point when I joined the FSA in about 2009, my predecessor had already decided to embed someone in UKRep because we were too often too slow. If you are not there when the conveyor belt starts, you cannot influence it and we were too far down it.
Look at the evidence of what happened with the way that the food information regulations were dealt with in Europe. There was massive lobbying against some of the things that we wanted to do, such as traffic-light labelling. I will not criticise people from other countries but the international lobbying was massive. We got a first-class individual, exactly as described by the noble Lord, Lord Kerr. I will not name them. There are negotiations and meetings while they are trying to get this stuff ready for the Parliament, which has more interference now—I meant more contact and should not have said that; parliamentarians should interfere but the EU Parliament has a different role now in this area—but there is no way that you would get all that detail back for Ministers and perm secs. The decisions would be done, so it is on a different level completely.
I wanted to reinforce that from my own little window of experience from the last few years. I beg leave to withdraw Amendment 10.
Transparency of Lobbying, Non-Party Campaigning and Trade Union Administration Bill
Lord Rooker Excerpts(10 years, 6 months ago)
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Lord Wallace of Saltaire
My Lords, I assure the House that the Government are open-minded on the possibility of changing a number of aspects of the Bill. One thing we discovered in the course of the consultation is that the language of PPERA 2000, particularly of Part 6, does not meet the needs or requirements of a very large number of those who are now to be affected by it. I hope I will not embarrass my noble friend Lord Greaves if I quote him as having said that he had never previously read Part 6 of PPERA 2000, and now that he has, he does not like it very much. I think that opinion is shared by a number of voluntary organisations outside the House.
Clearly, we will need to look at that in consultation with others. It may well be that we will need a government amendment. That is the process through which we should go on that and a number of other concerns that were set out very well in the Harries commission report: for example, the range of activities covered, the treatment of campaigning coalitions, the reporting procedures requested of campaigning groups and so on. We are open to listening, we are open to adjustment, and we expect that when we come back to Committee and Report, this House will give the Bill the detailed scrutiny that it needs.
Lord Rooker (Lab)
I have one narrow point. That was just a list of things that would be considered. One thing was mentioned specifically. It figures very largely in the report. It is the special situation in Northern Ireland. Will that be taken seriously in the five weeks? I was Minister for Northern Ireland for only a year, unlike many Members of this place, but I know that the nature of the third sector there and of its relationship with the political process is completely different from that in the rest of the United Kingdom.
Lord Wallace of Saltaire
I give an absolute assurance that we will take that fully into consideration. If the noble Lord would like to come to talk to me about it, I will be very happy to hear from him as well as from others.
Transparency of Lobbying, Non-Party Campaigning and Trade Union Administration Bill
Lord Rooker Excerpts(10 years, 7 months ago)
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Lord Rooker (Lab Ind)
My Lords, the note handed out by the Minister on 10 October stated:
“The Bill takes forward the Coalition Government’s agreement to enhance transparency around the interaction of certain ‘third parties’ with our political system”.
I did a search of the coalition agreement and no such thing is in there. The best I could find was in Chapter 16, “Government Transparency”, which states:
“We will regulate lobbying through introducing a statutory register of lobbyists and ensuring greater transparency”.
Elsewhere in the coalition agreement, I found lots about social action and,
“the creation and expansion of mutuals, co-operatives, charities and social enterprises”,
and about encouraging involvement in social action. The coalition agreement also boldly claimed that,
“our political system is broken”.
In fixing the broken system, the coalition now seeks to fix the system in a way that Putin in Russia would be proud of, by fixing the date of the general election and then snuffing out civil society in the year before it. That is the reality. It is quite clever: make the law imprecise so that civil society has no certainty, and give the policing of the law to a commission, which said of the Bill when it was first published in the Commons:
“We do not think it is appropriate for us to have the sort of wide discretion over the meaning and scope of the regulatory regime that the Bill as drafted appears to provide”.
The replacement wording now needs very rigorous testing in your Lordships’ House because new activities are covered for the first time.
As part of the government “fix” of civil society, the Bill introduces a major change in the Electoral Commission’s regulatory remit. This was not forewarned to the commission. No consultation took place with the board or the accounting officer and no rationale has been given. The House will need to test this when we debate Clause 35.
I say to the House that the same group of Ministers in charge of this Bill in the other place changed part of the remit of another regulator, the Food Standards Agency, in 2010—overnight and without warning—as regards food adulteration. Since then, we have had the horsemeat adulteration scandal, and in recent weeks the 2010 changes have been condemned by both the National Audit Office and the Defra Select Committee. We have been warned.
Of course, this worried Government believe that the Bill will not curtail freedom of expression by campaign organisations. That was in the note from the Minister, but those affected by the Bill must have another version of it. The Bill was not just rammed through the supine House of Commons by the coalition Government; it was printed and published the day before the Summer Recess. There was no consultation prior to publication and it was slipped into Commons Committee in the black hole of the two-week September sitting. The Government exercised bad faith by promising government amendments a week before Report but delivering them only two days beforehand.
The bodies affected by Part 2 of the Bill, which is all I am speaking about, will in the main be registered charities. This means, as has been said, that they are already regulated regarding all activities that they undertake, including during the election period. They claim that the Bill will place extremely tight restraints on their work 12 months before the election. It is also a direct threat to some of the most valued democratic principles, such as freedom of expression, and it undermines democratic participation by restricting civil society involvement in debates. Even now, we do not know whether charity or community volunteers’ time will be costed and included in the new time limits. There is still doubt about that. Assurances given by Ministers in the Commons regarding the ability to support specific policies have not been met.
The Bill rigs the financial limits by effectively counting twice the money spent if organisations are in coalition. This is a massive deterrent to, say, a charity for the homeless working in conjunction with an environmental charity to seek a new housing development—or it might stop two or more charities working together and joining their back-office functions to save money. Furthermore, the Government broke the national compact regarding consultation on matters affecting the third sector, and they cannot deny it. As has been said, the Bill creates a chilling effect on campaigning activity.
The Commons was treated with contempt, says the Political and Constitutional Reform Committee. At paragraph 3 of its report, it says:
“This is an object lesson in how not to produce legislation”.
It is the case that any and every organisation that seeks to influence public opinion, whether through campaigning or advocacy, in the 12 months before a general election, either directly or as a consequence of its actions, is now going to be covered. What a gift to those who conduct sham democracies around the world. Christian Aid cannot run its Make Poverty History campaign again in a general election year; the Royal British Legion’s Time To Do Your Bit campaign in 2010 cannot be repeated; and the Countryside Alliance will likely not be able to function at all in the 12 months before a general election. We are informed by NAVCA, the National Association for Voluntary and Community Action, whose members support 160,000 local charities and community groups, that the campaign it ran, Real Powers for Communities, could also not be run. That campaign, believe it or not, was designed to highlight the support that the coalition Government’s Localism Act could give to charities and groups. Is this all a mistake? Actually, I do not think so.
The Bill makes virtually no change regarding commercial lobbyists but punishes charities and other civil society groups. As has been said, we need to be mindful that those belonging to charities and civil society groups far outnumber those belonging to political parties. I wonder why that is.
For all the rhetoric, many members of the coalition have little or no regard or respect for civil society. The big society is okay when it is running a park or volunteering for the Olympics but not when it wants to speak up. That is the reality. If our political system is broken, this is not the way to mend it.
I suspect, and certainly hope, that this unelected House has more concern about freedom, plurality, good governance and, indeed, the rule of law than the Commons at the present time. Given the lack of pre-legislative scrutiny, the inadequate scrutiny that the Commons gave and the concerns of the regulator, if this House does not now do a decent job, we might as well ask Clegg to come back and abolish us, as he was planning to do in the first place.
It appears that the new constituency controls may be completely unenforceable, as we have heard, because of the combination of the lower registration threshold and spending limits, new constituency limits and the wider scope of regulated activity. Far more allegations of breaches of the rules will come forward in the heat of an election, as has happened in the past, yet the Government have still to explain how they think the Electoral Commission will enforce these new constituency controls. That was not even debated in the Commons.
I realise, of course—and I am not trying to win friends and influence people in the coalition at the moment—that the coalition has rigged this place to create a government majority for the first time, but it is not too late to make this a better Bill. We have not yet been given a list of issues from the previous general election, where there was concern regarding civil society, to justify this draconian measure. In fact, 33 non-campaign groups registered at the previous election. In total, they spent £3 million in the year before the election. The three main political parties spent £31 million in that year. Where is the problem? I repeat: £3 million was spent in the year before by those non-campaigning groups that registered. Indeed, the only issue that caused me concern at the previous general election was when I obtained a copy of the Conservative manifesto and saw on page 14 a full-page portrait of a named charity chief executive, who extolled the policies set out on the following pages.
In fact, at the last election I was, as is known, working for the Government as chair of a non-ministerial department, the Food Standards Agency. I was not on the Labour Whip and, as such, I did not undertake canvassing or any public speaking. So when I saw the Tory manifesto at that time, I was actually shocked. It was certainly a major lapse in the acceptable standards of conduct that one would expect from a registered charity. The person who signed off that manifesto also fell below the required standards. Frankly, I am not prepared to take any lectures about the moral high ground of non-party campaigning from this governing coalition when it pulled a stunt like that at the previous election.
Part 2 will have to come out or be substantially modified. From my three years’ experience of the coalition and of the way that we have been treated over some Bills, I am not going to trust any offer until I see it on the Order Paper.
Lord Wallace of Saltaire
I take the point that the noble Baroness makes. She has said to me off the Floor of the House that this ought to be reinforced by making sure that in the notes of the meeting there is a reference to the subject of the meeting so that those in the press and outside who want to understand what happened are informed which of the clients the meeting was about. This is therefore a step towards transparency. It does not claim to provide complete transparency on all contacts between outside proponents of particular policies and Ministers or officials. If we were to do that, we would find ourselves with a huge amount of information of the sort that the NSA loves to collect for the United States, but might not be beneficial to British politics. If we were to include all lobbyists, as some of the answers to the consultation wished, and included all charity lobbyists, I think that the answer from the charities sector would also be very negative. However, charities do have lobbyists. For example, Oxfam has people who actively lobby the public and the Government. Therefore, we have to be a little careful over how universal one needs to be. That is the importance of starting—perhaps others will want to go further—with a register of consultant lobbyists and of their major contact with the Government.
The noble Lord, Lord Norton, suggested that we should start at the other end by asking all officials and Ministers to register whom they have met. I see no reason why, in a sense, as transparency develops, the two should not come together. I have just filled in my quarterly return of whom I have met, including a number of people who could be described as lobbyists. Indeed, Saferworld was one of those that I reported on for obvious reasons: as I represent the Foreign Office, I talk to Saferworld and other such charities. That is part of what we already do.
The question of how far down the list one should go and whether it should include special advisers has also been raised. That clearly is a question to which we will return in Committee, and I look forward to that debate. However, I am conscious that the major concerns are on Part 2, to which I now turn.
I assure the noble Lord, Lord Phillips, that a Keeling schedule will be available well before Committee for everyone who wishes to look at it. I say with due confidence that, since he first asked me that question, I have discovered what a Keeling schedule is.
Lord Rooker
With respect, that is a worry, because that is the kind of thing that the Minister should have been advised about before the Bill was introduced. For the Minister to say now—and I am not being personal about this—that he did not know what a Keeling schedule was when we have a major constitutional Bill, and it is the norm to do it this way and has been for a long time, shows a failure of those who have been advising Ministers.
Lord Wallace of Saltaire
It shows my ignorance more than anything. The Bill team has a Keeling schedule, and it will be distributed. Of course, the Bill team has a Keeling schedule—it is part of what Bill teams have to do in preparing the Bill. Since this is a rather complicated amendment of PPERA, that is what we are into.
I stress, as has been stressed by a number of noble Lords, that this is an amendment to PPERA. It is about election law, not about charities law; charities are not the main target and not those mainly affected by it. The most recent Electoral Commission report on this said:
“The Commission believes that, where significant non-party campaigning takes place, this should be transparent and properly regulated ... We think these controls on campaigning that is not explicitly ‘party political’ are a necessary part of the regime. Without them, it would be easy to evade the rules by framing political campaigning in terms of policies. For similar reasons, we do not think the rules should exclude particular types of organisations, such as charities or voluntary bodies, as this would create opportunities for political campaigners to evade the rules and would reduce transparency. However, the necessarily wide scope of the definition of controlled spending makes it particularly important to consider the overall impact on campaigners of Part 2 of the Bill, including the registration thresholds and spending limits”.
That is what we will focus on in Committee—but it is correct that we should include this in the scope of the Bill.
I was quite surprised—
Civil Society
Lord Rooker Excerpts(10 years, 10 months ago)
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Lord Rooker
My Lords, I congratulate my noble friend Lady Prosser on introducing the debate and welcome the opportunity to say a few words. Before I set out an example of civil society, I want to do a tiny bit of scene-setting. As we saw this week, the UK is home to three times as many banker millionaires as the whole of the EU put together. The RSPCA has raised the pay for top executives into the £150,000 a year range, despite falling donations, and, in my view, is wasting money on prolific private prosecutions. Under the austerity regime that we are experiencing at the moment, when civil servants have been on an effective pay cut due to the pay freeze and pension cuts, the very top Civil Service levels have continued to receive eye-watering five-figure bonuses. I am as annoyed as Eric Pickles is at CLG at the failure to tackle the runaway local authority chief executive salary trough and the perks that are added to it. The Charity Commission, as it appears from the recent BBC “File on Four” programme, is busy certifying non-charities as charities. Seven out of 10 commissioners on the board are new and only one of them has any significant experience in the sector at all.
That is a bit of scene-setting for talking about civil society. Then I read Peter Oborne’s column in the Telegraph today. He says that the coalition has been brave and ambitious in challenging the official culture,
“dominated by the assumption that controlled, state-directed action held the key to national happiness”.
I have never agreed with that and I do not think that my noble friend has, from what she said earlier on anyway. Peter Oborne goes on to say that the programme of social change and economic reform,
“in its scope and audacity has no precedence in the post-war period, including the Thatcher years”.
The undertone of what is happening is extremely dangerous. I do not disagree entirely with everything that he says, but he then fails to ask who picks up the pieces as the state withdraws. That is the key question. If the policy is to have a shrunken state, which it clearly is—it has nothing to do with austerity in many ways—who picks up the pieces?
The effect of local authority funding being decimated is having a real negative effect on some of the frontline civil society organisations. On the one hand, local authorities are retreating from work by raising the bar of intervention—say in social services—and on the other cutting support to the private and third-sector operators in those areas. A young woman I met recently in one of our large northern cities works for an organisation that helps young people who are either homeless or in danger of becoming homeless. Her case workload left me staggered. It did not compare with what I had experienced during my 27 years in the Commons when qualified social workers carried out the work that she described. Social services have not even contracted out the work. They have simply raised the bar, saying that they do not do this any more, and their intervention comes only at the crisis level and then after lots of chasing up. This young woman had recently taken on supporting a very vulnerable female teenager who had run away from home several times and no one knew where she had gone. She had a drug history and was associating with much older men. For the princely sum of a pay rate that was a few pence above the minimum wage, this young woman worked over and above the call of duty in hours, support and liaison, and at levels which I know from experience qualified social workers did in the past.
This cannot be the way to pick up the pieces. As my noble friend said, it will end in tears. I fully appreciate that agencies at the centre and locally are having to make savings. I do not complain about that. I fully understand it and do not wish to be involved in a party-political dialogue about who is to blame. The fact is that that is the reality. It is obvious that the desire to replace services and shrink the state, which is certainly a central policy, is leaving gaps in areas that are difficult at the best of times. These areas were difficult when there was plenty of money. That is the point. By definition they are labour-intensive—very labour-intensive if one gets into the support of families. They are very challenging and often very sensitive. In short, they are the stuff that makes big headlines and calls for public inquiries when something goes tragically wrong in a specific case. That is the reality that we will be called to account for.
Slow growth and austerity are here for a while. I accept that. It would be ridiculous to work on any other basis. The population is ageing. More families are moving away or being moved away from social networks. These types of case will multiply. We need somehow to find a way properly to support the voluntary organisations. They are the bedrock and I am in favour of their not having as much red tape as local government. We need to do this not only with grants—finance is one area—but also with better routes into and support by the existing, remaining public services that can no longer fill their traditional roles. We have to accept that traditional roles are not being fulfilled by the statutory services, but they remain there with expertise infrastructure. We must find a way of enabling the voluntary sector, which is providing these services, to link in. We do not have that at present. It will end in tears if things simply carry on as they are at the moment. This is not all a call for more money. There has to be a better way of operating in the civil society.
Queen’s Speech
Lord Rooker Excerpts(12 years ago)
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Lord Ashdown of Norton-sub-Hamdon
My Lords, I did not say that there was no great campaign. I made it very clear that among the ordinary people of our country there was no great public cry for this, as indeed was the case with the suffragettes. I had a look at this in the Library only the day before yesterday and I assure noble Lords that that was the case. However, if noble Lords will not accept that, and it seems that they are not inclined to do so, I repeat that on the four occasions that this House has reformed itself it did so because it needed to, not because the public demanded it. So it was then and so it is now.
Finally, I turn to the question of the written constitution, because this has come up a number of times. Let me see if I may address it directly. Perhaps I may pick up on the statement, or perhaps question, of the noble Lord, Lord Rooker, during the debate last Thursday. He is a man for whom I have a great deal of respect and admiration, but he made an odd statement. He said that if we were to be a democratically elected second Chamber we would be the only one in the world with an unwritten constitution so to do. There are only three countries with an unwritten constitution—not a huge number. There is New Zealand, Israel and Great Britain. His argument was, “How could we make such a change when there is no model for us to work from?”. I looked at his statement in Hansard and could read it out to him; I have it here.
Lord Rooker
New Zealand and Israel are unicameral, for a start. The point I made was that we would be the only country with two elected Chambers and no written constitution.
Lord Ashdown of Norton-sub-Hamdon
My Lords, the point the noble Lord actually made, springing from that, was that we would not have a model to work from. Since when have democratic reformers in this country needed a model to work from? We have always had an unwritten constitution. Did it cause Cromwell to stop and say, “Hang on; I had better not go ahead with demanding that powers be transferred from the king because there isn’t a model anywhere else”? He was the model. Others followed him—not he followed others.
For the Great Reform Act 1832, we did not sit down and say, “Oh my goodness, we have no model to follow”. We had an unwritten constitution. We did not know how the powers would fall. We did not call for a constitutional convention to decide those powers before moving forward to reform. We made the democratic reforms and the world followed us. I am absolutely confident that, because we were ahead of the rest in 1832, the Great Reform Act saved us from the revolutions that swamped Europe in blood in 1848. Surely the noble Lord, Lord Rooker, is not one to argue that because we have an unwritten constitution we cannot have democratic reform. That is a ridiculous argument.
I say to those who say that we cannot have reform because we have an unwritten constitution, but at the same time talk about the magic of our unwritten constitution that reforms and resolves all matters, that I do not much believe in the unwritten constitution. To be honest, there is a case for a written constitution in this country. However, those who argue that the unwritten constitution resolves all, and that because it is a living constitution it can evolve and cope with these changes, cannot then say that some part of that constitution has to be written down. The proposition made by those who make that argument seems to be this: there has to be an unwritten constitution for everybody else but a written one for us—it has to be codified and we cannot otherwise move forward. You cannot make both arguments at the same time. Either you have an unwritten constitution, celebrate it and leave things to it, or you have a written constitution. However, noble Lords in this House seem to want the best of both worlds—an unwritten constitution for everybody else but a codified and written constitution for us and our relationships. The noble Lord, Lord Richard, was entirely right when he said that this should be left to the two Houses to work out. It would be better if it were.