Scotland: Independence

Lord Tyler Excerpts

Monday 16th June 2014 Grand Committee

[Lord Tyler (LD)]

My Lords, we should all be grateful to my noble friend Lord Purvis for initiating this debate, and to him and the noble Lord, Lord Foulkes, for the work they are doing with the all-party group, which is very timely. I notice that all noble Lords speaking today either have strong connections with devolved areas of the country or cannot really speak for England—and, indeed, Cornwall—beyond London, expect of course the Minister himself.

I should put on the record that, as long ago as 1968, I was the co-author of a booklet entitled Power to the Provinces, in which we argued the case for subsidiarity before the term was invented: that decisions should be taken as close as possible to the people they are going to affect. We are getting there, but it has taken a long time, as other Members have already said. The forthcoming Scottish referendum clearly brings a new cross-party and UK-wide focus to the need for a review of the situation. Today’s joint statement from the three Scottish leaders is obviously in that spirit.

The word “devolution” is usually used in terms of Scotland, Wales and Northern Ireland, while “decentralisation” is what people talk about in terms of England. There is a rather false distinction between the two, and I would argue that we need to try to bring them together. This Government have made huge strides in decentralising power within England using the City Deals. There has been a real difference there, but there is a degree of democratic deficit. These agreements between central and local government only go so far: they are, to some extent, about decentralisation of delivery but they do not empower local government in the same way that we have with devolution elsewhere.

I very much agreed with the noble Lord, Lord Whitty, who I am sorry is not able to be here today, when he said in the debate on the gracious Speech last week:

“We clearly recognise in Scotland and Wales the distance and resentment towards Westminster-dominated decisions. We need to recognise that the same instincts apply in Newcastle, Norwich, Cumberland and Cornwall”.—[Official Report, 11/6/14; col. 460.]

Hear, hear to that. The Secretary of State for Scotland, my right honourable friend Alistair Carmichael, recognised this too in his radio interview yesterday.

We have proposed a Bill to enable English devolution to fill this huge gap in our devolution ambitions for the United Kingdom. Credit should be given to Peter Facey, formerly of Unlock Democracy, who wrote about such a model in 2011. The principle is simply that parts of England may well want to take up powers akin to those already devolved to the Welsh Assembly, and that they should be able to do so provided they meet certain criteria. This would be true devolution within the United Kingdom, but it need not all happen at once in every part of England.

Dr Andrew Blick, in a very useful publication last week, proposed some similar ideas. He envisages devolution, first, of administrative power, then later of some legislative power—as happened respectively in 1998 and 2006 for Wales—and, in due course, of financial power to local authorities or groups of them. That is already happening—the City Deals are bringing together groups of local authorities in England in a very positive way. The menu of powers that he sets out is much as in the Government of Wales Act: everything is available, from agriculture to education and health services.

However, like the Spanish autonomous communities, different places could take up more, or less, responsibility according to local demand and the strength of local political identity. Having just spent the weekend in my old North Cornwall constituency, I can assure friends across the House that the demand there would be for a full assembly, like that of Wales and with the same powers. In other places, there may be a different timetable and a different objective. Dr Blick said,

“an English Parliament would not address the issue of over-centralisation in a meaningful way”,

and that it would be “a destabilising force”. Finally, he said:

“The history of federal experiments in other parts of the world suggests that when one component of the federation is so much greater than any other, the arrangement is difficult to sustain”.

I suggest that there is a trap in creating an unbalancing, centralising English Parliament without addressing further devolution within England.

For these reasons, I really think that the English question does not have an all-English answer. It is really not good enough. Real devolution within England through an enabling Act of the kind I have been able to only briefly describe—first to those areas which demand it and later to those areas that envy it—could advance the cause of really radical decentralisation in the whole of the United Kingdom, including its largest constituent part. This is a very timely debate and I am sure it will not be the last time that we will address this issue, as many noble Lords have already indicated, over the coming months. I welcome that.