Devolution: English Cities
Lord Rooker Excerpts(5 years, 4 months ago)
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Lord Rooker (Lab)
My Lords, I am very pleased to be able to support the noble Lord, Lord Heseltine, in this debate on his latest report. I start by highlighting some key sentences that jumped off the page as I was reading it. On page 13, he writes:
“I now believe I was wrong”.
On page 15, as the right reverend Prelate said, he writes:
“The three weeks I walked the streets”—
of Liverpool—
“opened my political eyes … There was no one in charge”.
On page 18, he writes:
“Political philosophy must be tempered with common sense”.
On page 20, he writes:
“One lesson learned was simple. If the only route to success was voluntary, then there had to be a deal with prizes!”
On pages 25 to 27, there are lots of examples of leadership and partnership bringing about success.
I know first-hand the esteem in which the noble Lord’s work is held in Liverpool. Until his sad death five years ago, I had a 50-year friendship from our Aston University days with a Liverpool-based journalist, Ian Hamilton Fazey, who was at one time the managing director of the Liverpool Post and the Liverpool Echo, and then for many years was the northern correspondent of the Financial Times. He followed the forensic dedication shown by the noble Lord to Liverpool, both before and after the 1981 riots.
During some of those years, I was the shadow housing and environment Minister in the other place. I was really grateful to those appointed by the noble Lord who took me on visits to, for example, the former Cantril Farm, now renamed Stockbridge Village, and explained what was going on in considerable detail. This morning, I re-read his famous minute to the Prime Minister from August 1981: “it took a riot”. It is easy to see from re-reading it why he took the view he did then about the met counties, but in all other respects, the themes in his latest report are set out in that note, which is nearly 40 years old.
The noble Lord’s proposals are a package that I, for one, can support. Whitehall finds devolution very difficult, as I know from my experience as chair of the Food Standards Agency. It will therefore need a drive from the centre, with support from the top, to deliver the change needed to allow English cities to breathe. Like him, I do not support a wholesale reform of local government, but we need to learn the lessons from recent years and see where reform to the combined authority boundaries and some of the city boundaries is needed.
I support close and detailed parliamentary scrutiny in the form of Select Committees, but should it be committees in each House or a Joint Committee? I am not sure. There is more experience in this House, but accountability of course lies with the Commons. I do not have experience of a Joint Committee of both Houses and do not know whether it would work: would the Lords be the junior partners, or would we have a free-standing committee of both Houses? I am open on that. It is also true that now that we have a form of fixed elections—whatever might happen with the Fixed-Term Parliaments Act—it makes good sense to review the clash of dates in the electoral cycle. Good accountability requires a degree of stability. That is important in both the private and the public sector.
I have also come to the conclusion, to which I had been opposed, that the role of the mayor and the police and crime commissioners should be combined. I understand that that was the original plan. However, it would be a retrograde step if the 2017 Tory manifesto was followed and the elections returned to first past the post. That was the commitment, and it would be a disaster. The present electoral arrangements have given us a range of police commissioners that we would not otherwise have had.
We will return to a modern form of skills training only with enhanced further education. When I last counted, this House included 40 chancellors of universities but not one boss from further education—not one. I freely admit that I was a child of FE; for three years in the late 1950s, after I left school and before I entered higher education. It is a completely different world. If you have not been in FE, you do not know about it. If you went from school to higher education, you have no idea what was happening in the 1950s and 1960s with further education in this country and the opportunities it gave to a range of people that are simply not available today. We need not to turn the clock back but to have a more modern version.
Buried deep in proposal 14 is the plan for, among other things, a tourist tax. I will leave most of the detail to my noble friend Lord Hunt, but a good test bed would be the 2022 Commonwealth Games in Birmingham. A pilot scheme could be set up. The Treasury will never like local taxes and charges, and so will wreck most good ideas. Therefore, we need a Chancellor with the confidence to change. If you have the confidence in what you are doing and the policy, you can embrace change and take a risk that might not work, but if you do not have the confidence, nothing will happen.
Having someone in charge is crucial, as the noble Lord said throughout his report. In my view, while not unfettered, the mayors should be able to explore different ways of working with the support of combined authorities, and the noble Lord gives examples of what could be done. It does not have to be the same in every combined authority; that is the beauty of it.
The report’s final key point is that the recommendations and observations strike at the heart of the way in which we run the country. That is pretty crucial, and it is a positive point rather than a negative one. We are where we are, and next week we will see a new Government formed. In my view, it would be a dereliction of duty to the country if this report were not used as a central tool of domestic policy while the Government continue to grapple with Brexit. I think it is a fantastic report
New Home Building Programme
Lord Rooker Excerpts(5 years, 10 months ago)
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Lord Bourne of Aberystwyth
It is a serious issue. He will know that we moved to ban combustible cladding very quickly when the evidence was there. We will bring forward regulations in relation to electrical safety. With regard to the Hackitt review, I have indicated that within the next year we will review all the documents relating to building safety with a view to ensuring that we minimise—and, I hope, eliminate—the number of accidents in the home.
Lord Rooker (Lab)
Does the Minister accept that this is really a branch of preventive medicine? In respect of the Government’s review, will they talk to Sir Nicholas Wald, professor of preventive medicine at the Wolfson Institute, where there are lots of good ideas in this area? While they are doing so, they might well ask him his views on the preventive medicine aspect of fortifying flour with folic acid, as in 1990 he headed the UK’s Medical Research Council, which discovered the link with the nutrient deficiency. That recommendation has been adopted by 80 other countries as a preventive measure.
Lord Bourne of Aberystwyth
My Lords, it is obvious that the noble Lord has been going to the same seminars as the noble Lord, Lord West, with regard to framing Questions, but I am sure that that point will have been picked up. On his general point, of course we are very happy to hear about prevention, which is indeed better than cure. A public health budget is held by the Department of Health and Social Care and that is the other side of the coin. We have the building regulations but money also needs to be spent on promotion to make sure that people are aware of these issues.
Affordable Housing
Lord Rooker Excerpts(6 years ago)
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Lord Rooker (Lab)
My Lords, I congratulate the noble Lord, Lord Shipley. The last time I looked at the figures for construction, conversion and demolition, I found that the average house in this country has to last 2,000 years. In the mid-1980s, when the national federation published the Duke of Edinburgh’s report on housing, the same calculation produced a figure of 800 years—that is the difference. I will concentrate today on the points made by Shelter. There is no sense in going over the problems; I want to concentrate on the solutions put forward by Shelter, and I will touch on some of them.
The first is the restoration of the affordable housing programme, cut by 60% in 2011 when the funding for social rent was completely removed. We also have to start to use our brains. I was on the original Standing Committee in the Commons when rent allowances became housing benefit. We warned at the time of the possibility that this subsidy to private landlords would get out of hand—it is now £24 billion. Look at the Guardian: four pages today and yesterday on the housing benefits scam for private landlords. Some of that should come back into creating social housing.
We have a housing team in the department, which I fully accept and back. But I hope that the Government have grown up. Nick Clegg said that he could not remember whether it was David Cameron or George Osborne who said:
“I don’t understand why you keep going on about the need for social housing—it just creates Labour voters”.
That was reported in the Independent on 3 September 2016, and it is not a grown-up way of looking at public policy. Given the fact that the Tories got 44% of C2DEs at the last election and Labour got 42%, the calculation and assessment does not apply anymore anyway.
Back to Shelter. Greater CPO powers for land to come into development has been touched on. The legislation could be put in the Queen’s Speech, and, as the noble Lord, Lord Horam, said, it is in all the parties’ manifestos—there is no division between us on this, and some serious action should be taken. The land value scam is crucial.
The third point Shelter made is that we need to get a central grip on this. I know that everybody says that it should be done from the bottom up and be community based—I worked with John Prescott for three years to get community planning right. But there has to be some drive in Whitehall at the top, because civil servants and Ministers come and go. You have to have a drive forward at the top, without micromanaging locally. Therefore, Shelter wants to establish development corporations that are powerful and able to assist and assemble a master plan for land, because you have to deal with CPO powers as well and act as master planners. Closing planning loopholes and the viability loophole are pretty crucial as well. Permitted development rights are really a bit of a scam that should be dealt with.
I have a suggestion. Back in 1997-98, when new Labour came into power—I am quite proud of new Labour by the way; my current leadership is not but I am—my noble friend Lady Armstrong of Hill Top, who was Housing Minister at the time, was lobbied by various bodies including Shelter about what to do about rough sleeping. So she said to Louise Casey of Shelter, “Okay, come into government and fix it”. The legacy of the plan put by Louise Casey, which I inherited for a couple of years as Housing Minister, was that by 2010 we had virtually eliminated rough sleeping in this country. All the statistics show that. So my suggestion to the Government is to think big. Go back to Shelter and say, “If you’ve got a plan and you’ve got solutions, why doesn’t one of you come in and help drive this forward?”.
Homelessness
Lord Rooker Excerpts(6 years, 10 months ago)
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Lord Bourne of Aberystwyth
My Lords, it has been central to the Government’s thinking that we make more use of the private rented sector in seeking to ensure that people who are homeless have somewhere to go. This was extended from the social sector so that appropriate private rented sector property can be used for homeless people in temporary accommodation. That is very much at the heart of what we are doing. However, at the same time, it is important that we increase the supply side. Therefore, we are building more houses to take in more people from the temporary accommodation list, so that we can ensure that everybody has a home. That is central to our thinking.
Lord Rooker (Lab)
Does the Minister recall that in about 2002 the then Labour Government persuaded Louise Casey to come from Shelter into the Government and that, with the programmes she set up, we virtually eliminated rough sleeping by 2010? What is the main reason it has come back again?
Lord Bourne of Aberystwyth
My Lords, first, this is not a problem unique to the United Kingdom.
New Towns
Lord Rooker Excerpts(7 years ago)
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Lord Bourne of Aberystwyth
My Lords, the right reverend Prelate brings in the important element of the necessary range of tenure and types of property. In garden town and village status applications, various things are looked at: the value-added aspect, need, particular aspects of community, green spaces, and design. All those things are weighed when awarding the status. I think 51 applications were made for garden villages; 14 were awarded. Those are the criteria we look at.
Lord Rooker (Lab)
As new towns, by definition, will not be built on brownfield sites, I urge the Minister, with the government machine, to constantly put the case for the building needed, because only 12% of the land of England is built on. We are not short of land; it will have to be what people call the green belt. I do not think that we as a Government did enough—nor have the current Government—to propagate the fact that there is more than enough land for the building needed.
Lord Bourne of Aberystwyth
The noble Lord has a point, though of course it is not always in the right places. Very often, we have great areas of green land where it would not be appropriate to put a new town. He is right about the pressures that exist and the fact that we often overstate the amount of built-up land, even in the south of England. That said, we are using brownfield sites, for example in Ebbsfleet.
West Midlands Combined Authority (Functions and Amendment) Order 2017
Lord Rooker Excerpts(7 years, 7 months ago)
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Lord Grocott (Lab)
My Lords, the noble Lords, Lord Shipley and Lord Hodgson, both referred to the consultation process. I do not really want to make an observation on that, but consultations are wondrous things, are they not? They are often prayed in evidence. The figure that the Minister gave was, I think, that 777 people or thereabouts had agreed with the proposals. What that represents as a proportion of the West Midlands would barely be able to be determined on a quite sophisticated computer—it is a very, very small proportion of the population of the West Midlands. Having said that, I find myself impressed at the idea that as many as 777 people agreed with the proposal—when I for one find even these orders extraordinarily complex—and had weighed up these issues and thought that, on balance, it was a good system to introduce.
On the question of intelligibility—there are a lot of things that I am not keen on, including the point implied by my noble friend Lord Snape—let us get it down to punter level. I lived just outside the area, but for someone living in the West Midlands area who is faced with a problem involving housing, transport or jobs, is there a simple guide being proposed by the Government that tells them whether to go to their directly elected mayor—even though the people of Birmingham voted against a directly elected mayor, as we know well enough—or to one of the members of the combined authority or to one of the constituent boroughs? Any democratic system, in my book at any rate, needs to be as intelligible as possible, and I am not at all sure about this new structure. It took the Minister, who understands these things, 10 minutes of speed-reading to refer to just these orders. The punters need to know what they are buying.
That brings me to my last point: has anyone worked out the cost so far of reaching the stage that we are at now? I dread to think how much it cost to produce these documents before us—I imagine quite a bit of ministerial and Civil Service time, not to mention the time spent by the local authorities themselves, who have had to submit evidence and attend meetings. And of course there is the cost of these elections, when they take place in May. Some indication, along the lines of the request of my noble friend Lord Snape, would be helpful for us to know precisely what sort of figures we are dealing with.
Lord Rooker (Lab)
I will briefly follow up on a couple of the points that have been made. I declare an interest in the sense that I live in the total area, as I live in Ludlow, in Shropshire. I will be amazed when the people of Shropshire wake up on 8 May and discover that they will be sending the combined authority what will be a few tens of thousands of pounds—they are not involved in the election of the mayor, because the mayor is only for the metropolitan county area, which is the old seven councils. I wish it well—do not get me wrong—but the noble Lord, Lord Hodgson, mentioned the variety of the area, and I think that we do need to exploit the assets of the area.
For example, there are 326 local authority areas in England, and their density of population varies from 9,000 people per square kilometre to well under 100 people per square kilometre—as it is in Shropshire. Of the 326, Shropshire lies at about 312; in other words, it is an incredibly sparse area. What that tells me is that it has land for development. We do not need to rip up the countryside to use the land for development, and therefore there is potential in this area—the motorway links are not brilliant, by the way.
I do not know what the local authorities will do about this. The bosses who run Shropshire are not very keen on factories coming into the area. I once raised the issue at a public meeting, as I think jobs and manufacturing are important. In the area of the old seven councils—where I lived and worked and I also represented the area, so I know what it is like—it is not easy to put a factory on a greenfield site. You cannot do that in the Black Country; you can use brownfield sites, but you are absolutely limited for modern, technological industrial undertakings and you cannot do it in the old way. I just want to put that on the record.
On consultation, I have not seen anything in the local papers about the effect of this. I remember that the issue of consultation was raised about three orders ago. I hope that we are not playing with fire, because the body is being set up and it will perform its functions from 8 May.
My final point is that, in the West Midlands, we miss figures of substance, if I can put it that way.
Lord Hodgson of Astley Abbotts
I think that the noble Lord will find that, because Shropshire volunteered, it was not consulted at all. The consultation referred to by the noble Lord, Lord Grocott, was about the West Midlands area. I do not think that there was any consultation in Shropshire at all; it was a volunteering effort by the Shropshire leadership. So I do not think that the people of Ludlow, where the noble Lord and I both live, would ever have had a chance to say anything.
Lord Rooker
That is right; it has not been commented on. It has not been an issue that has figured at all, and that is why I think it will be a bit of a surprise on 8 May.
My final point is that I hope that the new structure will generate some figures of substance. We miss in the West Midlands people of the stature of the late Sir Adrian Cadbury and the late Denis Howell, who were Midlanders who got things done. That is the one thing that has been missing in the West Midlands compared to the north-east and north-west, where figures of substance have emerged in a leadership role, which has transformed the communities. So in some ways I hope that—although I have not seen any on the horizon at the moment—once this new structure is up and running, such people will come forward.
Lord Kennedy of Southwark (Lab)
My Lords, I welcome the order before us today and I welcome the combined authority. It is good news that the constituent councils have all agreed this, and of course there are also non-constituent members taking part in this new arrangement. I lived in Coventry for many years, so I can see the logic of, for example, Nuneaton and Bedworth being part of the combined authority, as that is very near there. However, I do not know the area of Shropshire as well as my noble friend Lord Rooker does.
The noble Lord, Lord Hodgson of Astley Abbots, has raised an important point, though, about the wider area. I will not get into this today, but I think that there is an issue about where are going with local government in England. No party has dealt with this, outside of London, and it is an issue that at some point someone needs to deal with. I am not sure that these patchwork arrangements are the solution.
It is good that the consultation was positive, although I take on board the point that the number of responses was still quite low. However, for some of the other orders that we have looked at, the consultation response was very negative. At least the consultation response on this order was supportive of it.
When the Minister responds, it would be useful if he could comment on the powers that the mayor will have under the order. Will the mayor have the power to dispose of public land at less than market value for use as social housing? In terms of the mayoral development corporation, can he confirm whether it will have that power as well? As he will know, we tried to get this issue resolved in the Neighbourhood Planning Bill in respect of London, but for all sorts of reasons, which I am not yet quite clear on, it never happened, despite it being suggested and everyone being in support of it.
Can the Minister also say something about powers? I am conscious that this combined authority has more powers than some authorities but fewer than others, such as Greater Manchester, which has powers over the police and the health service. How would this authority go about getting further powers? Were there powers that were asked for but were refused? I do not know, and it would be interesting to find out.
The noble Lord, Lord Shipley, made a very important point about the remuneration panel. The idea of an England-wide panel is sensible, rather than having lots of different remuneration panels. That seems a good idea.
Having said that, I am content with the order. I shall finish my remarks by saying that I wish the authority well and, whoever is elected as mayor, I wish them well in this important role.
Housing White Paper
Lord Rooker Excerpts(7 years, 9 months ago)
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Lord Rooker (Lab)
Will the Minister confirm that the last Labour Government left 19,000 more hectares of green belt than they inherited and that the one thing we are not short of in this country is land? In England, the last time I checked, 15% of land is made up of areas of outstanding natural beauty—no one is talking about building on that—9% is made up of national parks, and no one is talking about building on that; while only 9% is actually built on, and 13% is green belt, most of which is rubbish land—collars around urban areas—which can be swapped. It can be built on because the infrastructure is there. This is nonsense—no one is talking about building over the countryside. Forty-six per cent of that, added to what I have just said, leaves 54% of land which is farmland and unprotected land. One thing that we are not short of is land—and the public sector, last time I checked, owns enough land to build 2 million homes. We keep being told about this but nobody is using it.
Lord Bourne of Aberystwyth
My Lords, I agree with the noble Lord about 13% of land in England being green belt. That is absolutely right; that figure has been constant for some years and we are determined that it should remain at 13%. I do not agree with the noble Lord about his classification of green belt land; it is absolutely vital that we maintain the green belt. But I do join him in saying that there is plenty of land that can be built on; 87% of land is not green belt, on that calculation, and there is much that we can do in relation to building on brownfield land and in relation to land that the Government hold—and, as I indicated in the Statement, that we are releasing, because the Government, along with everybody else, should not be land banking. It is important that we do that, and it is also important that local authorities that have difficulty identifying land in their own area should discuss the issue with their neighbouring authorities to see whether they can do something together. All those things are highlighted in the White Paper.
Housebuilding: Target
Lord Rooker Excerpts(8 years, 4 months ago)
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Lord Bourne of Aberystwyth
My Lords, the number of new homes built since the beginning of the Parliament is 171,000, which is higher than the previous year. The noble Lord is right that it was under 200,000, but it is more than the average for the previous 2005-10 Parliament. Obviously we are following the situation closely and monitoring progress. My right honourable friend the Secretary of State is meeting housebuilders today to discuss the position. I reassure the House that a record number of planning permissions—265,000 to March 2016—was given in the last year.
Lord Rooker (Lab)
My Lords, the Government and the wider public sector own land on which 2 million homes could be built, but only 12% to 13% of the land in England is actually built on. What is the problem?
Lord Bourne of Aberystwyth
My Lords, we are in the process of releasing public land for housing. We have released considerable tracts in Dover, Chichester, the north of Cambridge and Gosport, for example, and this work is continuing. The noble Lord is right to draw the attention of the House to the issue.
Fixed-term Parliaments Bill
Lord Rooker Excerpts(13 years, 8 months ago)
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Lord Rennard
My Lords, we had quite a substantial discussion on fixed-term Parliaments in the debate on the gracious Speech in May of last year. That discussion, I recall, was particularly difficult in the aftermath of the election, as perceptions of the coalition agreement clouded the debate on the principles of fixed-term Parliaments. It is already clear from the tenor of today’s debate that some of those difficulties remain.
Fixed-term Parliaments are not a short-term political fix but a long-term and overdue democratic reform. The idea that Parliaments should last for a fixed term is one to which the Liberal Democrats have subscribed for a very long time. It is also one which Labour supported in its general election manifesto only last year and which the Conservative Party accepted in the coalition agreement.
The Government have improved their proposal since last year, not least by dispensing with their original plan to set a threshold of only 55 per cent for the Dissolution of Parliament, which would have worked perhaps for this Parliament but not for most Parliaments. The Bill now provides for greater clarity to distinguish between votes of confidence and votes for Dissolution.
In order to have a fixed-term Parliament, there must be some form of mechanism to hold it in place. A substantial threshold for early Dissolution is clearly required. Without it, the legislation would be simply a statement of aspiration and a reiteration of the status quo whereby a Parliament lasts for five years unless a Prime Minister decides otherwise. The proposed threshold for Dissolution of the Westminster Parliament, a two-thirds majority, now closely reflects the arrangements set up by the Scotland Act 1998, introduced by the last Labour Government. Those arrangements have been shown to work very well since their introduction. Sadly, it was not a reform that the Labour Government extended to Westminster in their 13 recent years in office. However, Labour sought to rectify that in its last manifesto, in which it promised to legislate to “ensure” that there would be fixed-term Parliaments, although it did not say of what duration. I look forward to hearing from noble Lords opposite exactly how they intended to legislate to ensure that there were fixed-term Parliaments.
Labour’s pledge to legislate for fixed-term Parliaments was first made in 1992 by the noble Lord, Lord Kinnock, whom I am very pleased to see in his place today. In its manifesto of that year, the Labour Party criticised,
“months of on-again, off-again dithering which damaged our economy and weakened our democracy”,
after John Major delayed a much anticipated 1991 election. The Labour Party said then:
“No government with a majority should be allowed to put the interests of party above country, as the Conservatives have done”.
Labour promised fixed-term Parliaments in 1992 and again in 2010.
A fixed-term Parliament is accepted without controversy in most developed democracies—indeed, I believe that it exists in about two-thirds of democracies. It also exists for every single local authority and devolved Government here in Britain. It was introduced for all those devolved Governments during the 13 years of the Labour Government and each of them now operates a fixed-term Parliament principle. It is now the right time for the House of Commons to catch up with that principle.
I turn to the question of whether a fixed term should be of four or five years. The Government acknowledged that there is a genuine dilemma on this issue in their response to the report of the Political and Constitutional Reform Committee in the other place. They recognised that there is no monopoly of merit in the cases for four or for five years; it is a question of judgment. However, on balance, I am persuaded that setting the term at five years is right, because a four-year fixed term would mean Governments having a non-election-fighting life—a period of governing without immediate electoral pressures—of three years at most, which would not be sufficient.
There are other practical reasons for considering why five years is the right period. The previous Labour Government legislated in the Political Parties and Elections Act 2009 for a period covering party-political expenditure that works only in a five-year Parliament. Under the Act, the pre-election campaign period for regulating party-political expenditure starts 55 months into a Parliament—in other words after, and only after, four years and seven months—and it runs for up to 60 months after the previous general election, but for no longer. A few noble Lords may recall that I opposed those provisions at the time because they would work in practice only if there was a five-year fixed-term Parliament. That is now what is proposed and it would make those regulations on party-political controlled expenditure, introduced by the last Labour Government, actually work. The campaign expenses legislation that we approved only two years ago will now work in future.
I do not wish to repeat the debate that we had recently during the passage of the Parliamentary Voting System and Constituencies Bill—to do so would of course take a very long time—but I remind your Lordships that we approved legislation to review the constituency boundaries every five years. The first review of the constituency boundaries under the legislation that we so recently approved will be conducted by October 2013 and each subsequent review will be concluded on a five-year cycle from five years thereafter. To hold a general election in 2014, only four years after the previous one, would mean that the next general election would be fought only six months after the new constituency boundaries became known. If we have system of individual constituency representation, then that, I think, would be madness. Parties need time to find, select and promote candidates. Voters need to be able to assess them and their relative merits and to make informed choices. Even a period of 18 months between knowing the new boundaries and the general election may be too short to do this effectively, but anything less than a five-year Parliament will mean less than an 18-month period from knowing what the constituency boundaries will be to the Dissolution of Parliament and the commencement of the next general election.
Lord Rooker
I am interested in what the noble Lord has just said. He has made a specific and direct link between the five years in this Bill and the legislation that the House has just passed. He has done it in such a way as to suggest that basically you could outlaw any amendments for four years on the basis that the House has passed previous legislation for five years. The fact that he has made a direct connection between the two almost amounts to blackmail. If he had not said that towards the end of his remarks, I would tend to agree with most of what he said, but that direct link will be used to attack anybody who wants to move from five years to four years or four and a half years, if that is the desire. It cannot be a fair argument to use the kind of legislative trick that he has just played on us. My question to the noble Lord is this: during our Committee stage, will he be prepared to accept the good faith of those who want to promote four years or four and a half years and not suggest that they are seeking to go back and debate the previous Bill? If he will not spend time accusing people of that, I will withdraw the imputations that I have just made about his speech.
Lord Rennard
My Lords, early in my remarks I said that there is merit in the case for four years or for five years. The noble Lord should accept that and withdraw his remark that my suggestion that there are strong reasons why we should have five years rather than four years amounts to blackmail. Also, comments from a sedentary position that this sounds like blackmail are rather offensive and over the top in the circumstances of a genuine debate on this issue.
Parliamentary Voting System and Constituencies Bill
Lord Rooker Excerpts(13 years, 9 months ago)
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Lord Rooker
As an amendment to Motion A, leave out from “House” to end and insert “do insist on its Amendments 1 and 8”.
Lord Rooker
My Lords, I do not propose to rehearse the arguments again, although I thank the Minister most sincerely, because that is the first time that anybody has ever officially explained what my amendments to the Bill do. In the Political and Constitutional Reform Select Committee in the other place, nobody challenged the point. What the Minister has said also contradicts this morning’s Times leader, which is completely inaccurate. Frankly, that contradicts the reasons that we have been sent from the Commons. The Commons say:
“That the outcome of the referendum should be determined by those who vote in it and should not depend on how many do not vote”.
That is simply not true as a reason. I have said all along that if the turnout was less than 40 per cent, the House could decide to implement AV, and I would not argue with that.
I am seeking support for the request that the Commons have another short look at the issue. Yesterday, the Commons turned up for half a day’s work on this Bill, to add to the seven days they have already done on it—somewhat less than this House has done. The debate on my amendment to the Bill lasted 45 minutes, most of which was taken up by the Minister who was almost seeking to talk it out—
Lord Rooker
One can look at Hansard—the estimated time is about 14 minutes of debate. That was the first time the Commons have debated this issue. This is not the issue that they debated last November, of a “killer, fatal threshold”, although those are words I would refrain from using as that is not what it is.
The Minister’s comments about the electoral register, notwithstanding the debates that we have had, show that we are in a complete and utter mess as a democratic country if we cannot say that we have a national register that measures the electorate for a particular ballot. That is one criticism of my amendment to the Bill, because we do not know what the electorate is. The electoral register includes foreigners, who may vote in some elections but not others, the dead and those who have moved home or who own a second home. The fact that we have no national electoral register prevents any serious discussion about the mechanism of our democracy. That has been thrown into a starker light than it ever was before. However, I do not want to go down that road, as I want to be quite brief.
I submit that the issue of substance lies not in the figure of 40 per cent—that could have been any other figure that was thought to be reasonable, whatever people might have said—but in whether the referendum should be binding, without any constraint whatever. We have never done this before in this country, and a precedent is being set. That is the point that I am seeking to make with my amendment to the Bill—not to argue against the result of the AV referendum one way or the other. The serious problem is that we are creating a major precedent in our constitutional arrangements, which the other place has not addressed. That is why I ask, even at this late stage, for the Bill to be sent back so that the other place can address this issue to the degree that it should.
I am not against reform of our constitutional arrangements, but such reform is likely to be sustainable if there is a degree of consensus. With proper debate—White Papers, Green Papers, Joint Committees—we get a consensus about these things and we test the ideas. That has not been done in the case of the proposed binding referendum, the legislation for which would be in place to be activated, whatever the result and whatever the turnout. However, that consensus has not been achieved, although I know there has been cross-party voting, including last night—the Minister declined to mention that several Tory MPs voted for my amendment to the Bill, but I will not make a major point about that.
My point is that, as I face the Chamber, the two oldest political parties in the country are joining together to rewrite our constitution on a daily, as-you-go-by basis. In other words, we do not know what is happening next. This cannot be the right way to operate; it cannot be the right way in which to bring in a major constitutional change of the first ever binding referendum in the UK. There is no big picture by which we may judge this part of the constitutional changes—we know that there are others on the conveyor belt—and that is a major difficulty.
My amendments to the Bill were made in the spirit of compromise. Frankly, they say that the referendum shall be binding if more than 40 per cent turn up, and that is a compromise on my part. I do not think that a binding referendum ought to operate in a parliamentary democracy. The Minister said yesterday, in the context of the Isle of Wight issue, that it is not the opinion of this House that counts, but the strength of the opinion of this House that counts. I accept that, on the Minister’s test, the majority of one may be a bit shaky, but I have to say that that was on a 40 per cent-plus turnout of this House. While the level of the majority may not meet the Minister’s test, it certainly meets the test that we are actually voting for. I seek to move to strengthen the opinion of this House so that that can be taken on board.
There is plenty of time, but I know that a lot of time will not be spent on it. When history comes to be written and when this issue operates out there among the public, the question may be asked, subject to the result, “What on earth was Parliament doing?”. I want to be able to say that we used all the time available to test this issue to get them to think again. Today is an opportunity to do that. I beg to move.
Lord Lloyd of Berwick
My Lords, listening to the noble Lord, Lord Rooker, I am reminded irresistibly of the last occasion when we had before us a major constitutional Bill. I refer, of course, to the stages leading up to the passage of the Constitutional Reform Act 2005. There were then two main issues on ping-pong, just as—leaving aside the Isle of Wight issue—there are two main issues today. The first of the two main issues in 2005 was whether the Lord Chancellor should continue to be a Member of this House; the second was whether the Lord Chancellor should be required to be a lawyer. It was a Lords Bill, which of course this Bill is not. The first time round, the Government lost on those two issues by a substantial margin. The majority against the Government was 215 to 199. When the Bill came back from the Commons, the Lord Chancellor speaking on behalf of the Government said:
“Of course our power is to make the other place think again. They have thought again… Our job is to make the other place think again. Once we are satisfied that they have done so, then we should pay proper regard to their views”.—[Official Report, 21/3/05; col. 38.]
The question that I ask the noble and learned Lord, Lord Falconer, is whether he still abides by the principle that he stated so clearly on that occasion. They were the very last words that he uttered after a very long, drawn-out affair, which he will remember as well as I do, but they were the words that carried the day on that occasion. The Government won by 203 votes to 191.
The question I then ask is whether that principle should not be applied today. It seems to me that the case for applying that principle today is far stronger than it was when the noble and learned Lord, Lord Falconer, stated it, for on that occasion the Bill affected this House. It affected it because it would have abolished the office of Lord Chancellor—had that proved to be possible, which it did not—and ejected from this House the Law Lords, where they had been for 150 years or more. Nevertheless, on that occasion this House yielded to the other place. On this occasion, by contrast, the Bill seems to relate almost exclusively to the other place, not to us. Surely, if ever there was a Bill on which we ought to yield to the elected House, seeing as it relates to election to that House, it is this one. When the time comes, I shall therefore vote with the Government.
Lord Wallace of Tankerness
My Lords, yet again, we have had a useful debate, with some powerful arguments made. I anticipated at the beginning of the debate that strong points would be made, but, nevertheless, we cannot depart from the central point. We are being invited to include in the referendum process a mechanism whereby, if a majority of the people vote yes, it will not necessarily deliver a yes outcome. I take the point made by my noble friend Lord Trimble. Although my noble friend Lord Forsyth was right to say that the 40 per cent rule in the Scottish referendum in 1979 is not the same as that proposed by the noble Lord, Lord Rooker, nevertheless, the point made by my noble friend Lord Trimble still holds. If people turn out and there is a yes vote, serious resentment would then be felt if somehow that was overturned by this House or the other House. At a time when we are trying to restore trust in the political process, to set aside the majority view of the people would be very serious.
The noble Lord, Lord Rooker, said that his amendment would not affect the outcome. I cannot accept that. It would not affect the result, but it could affect the outcome. Clearly, without his amendment, if there is a yes vote, the outcome is that the order would be laid to implement the system of an alternative vote for the next general election. His amendment could result in a different outcome, because if there was less than a 40 per cent turnout, it would not follow that an alternative vote would be used at the next election. Let us not shy away from the fact that his amendment would affect the outcome of the referendum in that important sense.
I take the point made by my noble friend Lord Lawson, who said that I had argued that it was a “stay at home” amendment. The “no” campaign could very well encourage people to stay at home to reduce the turnout. Because 84 per cent of the country will already be entitled to go to the polls on that day for the Scottish Parliament, the National Assembly in Wales, the Northern Ireland Assembly and local government elections in Northern Ireland and all parts of England bar London, if people want to vote no, we want them to turn out to vote no. We should not be giving people an encouragement to think that if they stay at home, they have the equivalent of a no vote, in as much as the yes vote may not bear fruit.
The Bill offers simplicity, clarity and certainty. It honours the promise to the electorate that they will decide how they return their representatives to the other place. They will do that as the result of a referendum without artificial barriers, without further complex, as yet undetermined, procedures and without political wrangling. It means that when they go to the polls on 5 May and want to vote yes, the outcome will not be “yes, maybe” or “yes if”. If they go to the polls to vote yes, it will count. Whatever the issues on the day are, their vote should be heard, listened to and given effect.
Lord Rooker
My Lords, I am incredibly grateful for the support for the amendment to ask the other place to think again. We have just spent a bit longer on it—seven minutes longer—than they spent on the whole of it last night, including the vote. I have made my point. I beg to test the opinion of the House.