Rights of the Sovereign and the Duchy of Cornwall Bill [HL]

Lord Stevenson of Balmacara Excerpts

Friday 8th November 2013 Lords Chamber

[Lord Stevenson of Balmacara (Lab)]

My Lords, we owe my noble friend Lord Berkeley a vote of thanks for raising an issue of this nature. It has not been an easy debate for him to launch, but he has struggled on with it. As he said, he has been following these issues for some years. The note from the Library which came around earlier certainly exemplifies that, with the number of questions that he has been asking and the detail that he has been trying to dig out.

The noble Lord, Lord Cormack, obviously takes a different view and did so in his very interesting style. As somebody on these Benches said to me, it was a speech that could have been made at any time in the past 400 years. There is credit in that; it is a compliment, not necessarily an attack. He referred to yesterday’s debate on Magna Carta, which was extremely interesting because, among the issue that we talked about—how Parliament would celebrate Magna Carta in June 2015—there was a current about the constitutional issues.

There is no doubt that Magna Carta in its original form and various manifestations since then—something like 14 different charters were issued until it died out in the mid-15th century—was and is a particularly important document for the way we organise and run our society. Is it a constitutional document? Almost certainly, and two clauses in it are still extant in our laws. However, the point is that we do not really understand where our constitutional documents lie. People often ask for a written constitution. As I said yesterday, that is a mistake: most of the constitutional arrangements are written down, but the difficulty is that they are not brought together in a codified form. Even if that were to happen, as I strongly believe it should, difficulties would remain with the royal prerogative and other areas of our constitution which are not as well exposed as they could be.

That is my point about this Bill. My noble friend Lord Berkeley makes a number of specific proposals, but the general point is about trying to throw a light on activities which affect individuals up and down the country, but particularly in Cornwall. That plays to a larger concern about the extent to which those areas of our constitutional arrangements which are not as well scrutinised as they might be can sometimes affect particular aspects of the process of government in which we are all involved. It may well be that pig husbandry is not the most important issue. However, this is probably not the only Bill—there was another one—in respect of which thought was given to whether, if put forward in its present form, it might need to be changed later. My noble friend Lord Berkeley is pointing up, in this section of the Bill, the hidden areas of activity which make up the law-making and governing of our country.

Other parts of the Bill will apply in other ways to different areas. However, it seems to me and these Benches that we should not miss the chance to have a good look at some of these areas and the specifics that my noble friend has raised in his Bill. We should be concerned about whether or not this is the right way of proceeding with this sort of legislation. The noble Lord, Lord Cormack, is right to say that all legislation would be better if it were subject to pre-legislative scrutiny. I wish his party could put more effort into that—I am thinking in particular of the Transparency of Lobbying, Non-Party Campaigning and Trade Union Administration Bill, which is a classic. The noble Lord nods well, but I wish that he would join us in discussion sometimes. I look forward to seeing him on those Benches on Monday when we will talk about Part 3, which was subject to no consultation whatever before being introduced. Is this the way to govern a country? No, it is not.

We accept pre-legislative scrutiny. The Bill has not been subject to that, although it is hard to see how it could be, given that it is a Private Member’s Bill. To the extent that it could be discussed, we wish it well.