Barnett Formula

Lord Tunnicliffe Excerpts

Wednesday 15th June 2011 Lords Chamber

[Lord Tunnicliffe]

My Lords, I, too, thank the noble Lord, Lord Barnett, for raising this debate. I also congratulate the noble Lord, Lord Stephen, on his participation, and we all look forward to future contributions.

I am praising the noble Lord, Lord Barnett, not only for his enormous contribution to political life in this country, both in office and subsequently in your Lordships’ House, but also for the Barnett formula. Whether one likes it or not, it has a characteristic of having survived; it has a characteristic of having done what it initially set out to do—to stabilise expenditure and allow planning in Scotland and Wales; and it has a characteristic that it has allowed devolution to take place. It has some good points—the sorts of points that the previous Government made in reacting to the Select Committee’s report.

We speak as though the Select Committee report was an answer in itself. It was not. What it said is, “You want to get yourself a commission, then we have this thing called needs and we will write some words about it but the commission has got to fill in the gaps”—a non-trivial task. The committee made a case that there is concern about this formula in Scotland, Wales, England and, I suspect, Northern Ireland. However, one should also remember that any change will be enormously difficult to change again so it has to be got right.

What does getting it right mean? First, it has to be fair. The idea that the word fair is not political is absurd—it is actually a deeply political word—so it has to be both fair and it has to enjoy political consensus. If it does not, it will not sustain, and falling apart quickly would be much worse than where we are. The facts of life are that we are a long way from political consensus. As the noble Lord, Lord Foulkes, points out, perhaps we should consider something a great deal more radical. It has been pointed out by other noble Lords that we need agreement across parties, across the stakeholders, for this to work. We do not have that. The SNP simply failed to engage with the Select Committee—never mind disagreeing with it, it failed to engage. With its recent success in the polls we have to recognise it is a force and it has to be a force in anything that comes out of it.

We have had continuous change and we are going to see this change in the Scotland Bill. We all look forward to the debate on the Scotland Bill because a lot of these issues will come out and we will be better informed after that. There are clear concerns in Wales that mean that any solution has to be a solution for all parts of the United Kingdom, not just for Scotland.

It is perfectly proper that the Government should be concerned about the issues raised tonight and I hope that they will indicate that at some point they will look at how to address these. Equally, I do not urge them to move in haste on this issue. In far too many places in the latest legislative programme we have seen legislation in haste. We do not need it in this case. They have to take a careful, measured approach to secure agreement about fairness and consensus. So I am not going to urge them tonight to act in haste.