Elections Bill

Debate between Lord Stunell and Lord Lipsey

Lords Hansard - Part 1 & Committee stage
Thursday 10th March 2022 Lords Chamber

[Lord Lipsey (Lab)]

My Lords, I will briefly make a point about these proceedings. As I understood it, when we debated the amendments in the name of the noble Baroness, Lady Meacher, the Minister said, “We should not have these general arguments; we should be focusing on the specific amendments.” In a corner, as he was, I can see that that was the best sort of argument available to him. Now we have nearly 100 amendments which change the law of this nation, and how much time did the Minister devote to each of them? It was six seconds. This is not a detailed examination of a Bill; it is a Minister who thinks that whatever he happens to want—I am sure that most of these amendments are completely acceptable—should go through without proper debate, consideration and deliberation by this House.

I say that both as a protest and as something that I hope the House will carry forward in its future deliberations on the Bill. It cannot be done at the kind of speed whereby 100 amendments are considered in one grouping. It will not be done, and we will stop it being done.

[Lord Stunell (LD)]

My Lords, I will speak very briefly to this amendment. I seem to have used my time allocation earlier—I apologise to the Minister for wasting his time. However, as the noble Lord, Lord Lipsey, and my noble friend just pointed out—the Minister probably cannot hear me with my mask on, so I am sorry about that as well—it is six seconds per amendment against 13 per amendment on my part. I apologise for that.

I will pick up on a couple of things. The Minister expressed regret that Scotland and Wales had opted out of the application of Clause 14 in those two nations. He will understand that I think they have shown the utmost common sense in doing so, and I do not think it is a cause for regret at all. I certainly support what my noble friend Lady Humphreys had to say about that.

I will bring the Minister back to the fig leaf of consultation in new Section 4A in Clause 14. I said before that of the five bodies, four were completely hostile and one other was captured by the Cabinet. There is now a proposal here which means that one of those—PACAC—is captured by the Select Committee for the Department of Levelling Up Housing and Communities, and that Secretary of State will be making the strategy statement: that is something else that has got worse as a consequence of that.

I put back into play the point I made before, that if Scotland and Wales are not going to be part of new Section 4A and if PACAC is going to be neutered and transformed, it might be time to add the CSPL as one of those bodies which should be statutorily consulted as the creator and, up till now, the recommender of progress and developments on that Electoral Commission body. I would have thought that some voice for local government in that consultation should be statutory there, of course only for England, because Scotland and Wales have sensibly opted out.

We shall not oppose these amendments but we believe that the direction of travel on this suggests even more reasons for reforming the application of Clause 14 when we get to that debate.