Intergovernmental Relations Within the United Kingdom
Lord Wallace of Saltaire Excerpts(1 year ago)
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Lord Wallace of Saltaire (LD)
My Lords, in winding up his speech, the noble Earl, Lord Kinnoull, said that what we needed was constitutional stability. We have not had it for the last five years. We have had intense constitutional instability, as the noble Lord, Lord Hennessy, keeps reminding us in his latest book. Effective government will not survive unless we have some quite serious constitutional change within the next five to 10 years. I look to the next Government to be a great deal less cautious about attacking some of these major issues of our constitutional weaknesses and engaging in constitutional change on a cross-party, consultative basis to make sure that we try to get some of this right.
We need constitutional, doctrinal and cultural change. The doctrine of parliamentary sovereignty was honed by AV Dicey as part of his campaign opposing Irish home rule. He said that the Imperial Parliament was always right and there could be only one centre of power, thus Irish home rule and devolution were impossible and had to be got over. Post Brexit, we heard the doctrine of indivisible parliamentary sovereignty being put out very strongly. This doctrine includes the idea that local government is simply an agent of central government—Michael Gove clearly believes this completely—and that local and regional democracy are not an important part of our democratic life.
We need cultural change because, as a number of noble Lords have said, we need parity of esteem and to take seriously those working at a lower level. Multi-level government is something we have to learn, and which is foreign to a great deal of the way in which British and Imperial government has operated in the last 150 years. I would remind the noble Baroness, Lady Wolf, that one of the advantages of being within the multi-level government system of the European Union was that our universities, many of which had been really quite parochial, learned about foreign partnerships. We moved towards a degree of convergence across Europe in the structure of degrees because we were part of that broader complex. We have to learn a different approach to politics.
I thought it would be helpful if I spoke as a Yorkshireman, and as someone who has been involved all my life with politics in Yorkshire, about the problem of England and of English regions. I was walking back from Millbank just before this debate with a Yorkshire Conservative MP. He was talking about our common approach in asking for a Yorkshire regional entity, and saying how Gove and others had pushed us back on it. It was very much an all-party approach—from local council leaders, MPs and others in Yorkshire. It was pushed back, so we now have a North Yorkshire Council which has had imposed upon it as a condition of the regional deal a North Yorkshire elected mayor, for which there are already five candidates. On the first past the post system, it is quite possible that the new mayor will be elected with no more than about a third of the vote. Of course, the mayor will not just represent North Yorkshire; he or she will represent York, which was kept out of North Yorkshire because it was either under Liberal Democrat or Labour control and therefore not to be included in Conservative North Yorkshire.
Yorkshire is a mess. There is no ward representative on the new North Yorkshire Council who takes more than two hours to drive from his or her home to county council meetings. I remind noble Lords that Yorkshire is the largest county in England, with a population equivalent to that of Scotland. It has no voice to speak for it in London.
The problem of England—it is also a problem of the devolution settlement that we already have because England is so dominant in it and English Ministers so often forget about the relevance of the other devolved authorities—has to be faced. I hope that, whatever new Government we have, we will at last grasp the need for a coherent approach to regional and local government within England.
Incidentally, that will also begin to resolve the problem of the overconcentration of civil servants in London. I can remember when the West Riding authority had a substantial education department, because it ran its own education. Education is now controlled very clearly from London. I can remember when there was a regional centre of government in Leeds. If you pull these things back, civil servants will spend more of their careers—at the very least some of them—working outside of London. That is a much better way of ensuring that we have a thriving democracy.
I welcome the Dunlop review, which was entirely right to say that what we need is one senior Cabinet Minister responsible for intergovernmental relations. I remember the Department for Constitutional Affairs, which, in effect, did some of this. I am not persuaded that we still need, in a Cabinet of 33—that is already too large to be an effective decision-making body—three separate Secretaries of State for devolved powers.
Incidentally, we have not talked about the British-Irish Council in all this. It was originally part of the way in which we dealt with the devolved Administrations, the Government of Ireland and the Crown dependencies, which we always forget about. It seems to me that, in some way or other, we need to grapple in the next Parliament with the question of what exactly the role and responsibilities of the Crown dependencies are. As we have recently learned, a number of Members of this House keep their financial interests there for tax-efficient reasons. As such, the question of the Crown dependencies’ relationship with the UK is one that a committee of this House might like to examine.
Where do we go from here? It seems to me that the task of the next Government is to grapple with this issue, partly because levelling up has clearly not succeeded. I feel resentment from the people I meet in Yorkshire about the failure of levelling up, as well as about the promises made by Boris Johnson and others. The thought that we would have begun to have improved infrastructure and greater finance for local authority action has been disappointed.
We would be much better off if we had the formal arguments that we see in Germany about fiscal federalism, which means dividing up the regional impact of the national budget. We would then begin to talk about it, rather than saying, “Oh well, there’s the Barnett formula, which is automatic”, then forgetting about the regions of England. Considering that part of fiscal federalism would be provision for a second Chamber in which there would be regional representation, it could be part of the way in which we might make the weaknesses of our system of government rather less awful than they have been. In a sense, we are half way towards a federal system. We need to go a little further in that respect. I would welcome an open discussion about the regional distribution of public spending, rather than the empty promises that Boris Johnson made, which have led to so much disillusion in the north, the south-west and elsewhere.
We certainly need to restore local democracy in England. It has been dreadfully weakened. As we all know, a number of local councils are likely to go bankrupt in the next year or two. That matters. We know from public opinion polls that public trust in local democracy is higher than public trust in national democracy. Incidentally, we also know that public trust in Westminster politics has fallen below 10%—the lowest it has yet hit. This ought to worry all of us in both Houses very considerably.
We need to strengthen intergovernmental machinery, as a number of noble Lords have said. We need regular ministerial attendance and to develop, as the Lords Constitution Committee said, a modern form of shared government which is fully understood at all levels of government. There are indeed many other areas of constitutional reform which a new Government should take in, but that perhaps will wait for a future debate.
Representation of the People (Overseas Electors etc.) (Amendment) Regulations 2023
Lord Wallace of Saltaire Excerpts(1 year, 1 month ago)
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Baroness Hayman of Ullock (Lab)
My Lords, I have just one very quick point. The noble Lord, Lord Hayward, talked about the fact that I had asked about reviews; when we consider the potential for election fraud, that is really important. The Elections Act was brought in, according to the Government, because they were concerned about shutting the door on fraud. My concern is that this will open the door to more than they will stop.
I will just pick up some of the things the Minister said in her introduction. If there is no national insurance number, there needs to be documentary evidence provided. That will be provided by the applicant. Checks against the electoral register at the moment go only up to 15 years. The Minister said that will be retained for longer in future, but how do we know how accurate it is now? How will we measure that? What analysis will the Government do as this goes forward to check on the potential level of electoral fraud, and how is it going to be reviewed and analysed in future? We need to make sure that the people on the register are those who need to be on the register—especially if that can then lead to donations.
Lord Wallace of Saltaire (LD)
My Lords, we on these Benches are in favour of extending the franchise further, but as part of a wider reconsideration of inclusion on and exclusion from the register. I remind the House that we have an estimated 8 million British citizens living in this country who are not on the register—about which something ought also to be done. We are concerned about how this is implemented and some of its unintended consequences. I remind the House that there are 3.5 million British overseas citizens. That is, by my calculation, roughly 5,500 per constituency, if they all registered. If we assume that no more than 50% register, that is still well over 2,000 per constituency. I am sure the Minister will have been briefed that overseas registration in constituencies is not uniform but highly variable. Some London constituencies already have approaching 2,000 overseas electors, whereas a number of constituencies in Wales have fewer than 20. That is to be expected. Next time we redraw the tightened boundaries of our constituencies, do we take into account the number of overseas voters who are registered in various constituencies? If we do, some London constituencies will get quite a bit smaller because the numbers of overseas voters will take them way over the quota.
Baroness Penn (Con)
Well, as under the current system, all overseas applicants need to prove their identity and their verifiable connection to a UK address. A broad range of offences and penalties applies to persons seeking to register. If the applicant is not registering in compliance with those rules, an electoral registration officer who suspects fraud, for whatever reason, will ask them for further information and will not register the individual if they are not satisfied. So, there may be different routes to enforcement, but the key point here is whether people would be able to get on to the register using inaccurate or fraudulent data. That is what we have put protections in place to prevent. Registration officers are experienced in assessing evidence and, as I have said, as now, when they suspect fraud, they will have the power to ask for further information.
The noble Lord, Lord Khan, also asked about the process for using—
Lord Wallace of Saltaire (LD)
Has the Minister ever visited an electoral registration officer’s office? Does she realise how small the numbers of staff are? The idea that they can take on all these checks, even outside the short election campaign when they are always extremely busy, does seems a little optimistic.
Baroness Penn (Con)
My Lords, I will come on to the question of resources and implementation later in my response but, as I said at the start of my speech, the expansion of the franchise does not change the principle of the franchise. People who have been abroad for up to 15 years are able to vote and these measures are expanding that further.
I was going to add more on the process of using attestations to demonstrate the connection to the UK address, as this was asked about by several noble Lords. It is important to make this work, so that an eligible applicant has every opportunity to demonstrate their eligibility. We anticipate that an electoral registration officer will be able to verify most applicants’ connection to their qualifying address using register checks or DWP historic address matching. Where this is not possible, applicants will be able to provide documentary evidence or, failing that, an attestation. This is in alignment with the processes for verifying identity. We have considered feedback from stakeholders on the different types of documentary evidence that an overseas applicant may have available to them and enabled electoral registration officers to consider a wide range of documentary evidence, providing that it contains the applicant’s name and qualifying address. This is a hierarchy of processes that applicants must go through. Attestation can only be used if those other processes have not been able to establish the information needed.
The attestation process is a long-established process for voter registration and, as I said before, used only where other methods of verification have been exhausted. Attestors are subject to certain requirements and must provide information that demonstrates that they meet those requirements. They must declare that all information in an attestation is true and acknowledge that it is an offence to provide false information to an electoral registration officer. The Government believe that these instruments strike a balance between the accessibility and integrity of the attestation process by introducing new limits on the number of individuals an attestor can attest for within an electoral year. The Electoral Commission provides guidance for EROs on verifying attestations and has the power to reject those attestations.
General Elections: Party-political Spending
Lord Wallace of Saltaire Excerpts(1 year, 2 months ago)
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Baroness Penn (Con)
I believe that the rules regarding third-party campaigning organisations will also be uprated as part of this work.
Lord Wallace of Saltaire (LD)
My Lords, there are a number of proposals for limiting the size of donations. Have the Government taken any issue with that? I have looked at the reports on donations for the first six months of this year, and the three largest donations to the Conservative Party were two individual donations of £5 million and one of £2 million. One was from a British-Egyptian national who was a Minister in a previous Egyptian Government and whose interests appear to be based primarily in Dubai. Another was from someone listed with Companies House as an Indian national— I assume therefore resident in London—whose interests are primarily in Thailand and Indonesia. Is it not time that the Government became much stricter on the size as well as the origins of individual donations?
Baroness Penn (Con)
My Lords, the Government have no plans to limit the size of donations made. We have procedures in place to ensure that there is transparency over those donations and, as we are discussing today, spending limits for candidates and parties in elections. That is how we govern the use of money in our political system.
Levelling Up: Project Delivery
Lord Wallace of Saltaire Excerpts(1 year, 2 months ago)
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Baroness Penn (Con)
My Lords, after announcing round 2 of the levelling-up funding, we recognised how many high-quality bids we had from councils that we were not able to meet during that round. That is why we took a different approach in round 3, looked at those existing bids and were able to make the allocations that were announced earlier this week. All in all, over 200 places have benefited from funding from the levelling-up funds. We recognise that there is a cost involved in bidding in these processes. That is why we provided those local authorities that were assessed as most in need in rounds 1 and 2 with additional funding to support the development of the bids in the first place.
Lord Wallace of Saltaire (LD)
My Lords, the Government have talked a lot about the need to reduce bureaucracy and to cut the size of the Civil Service. Yet this entire scheme is extremely bureaucratic and takes a great deal of Civil Service time for the competitive allocation of very small funds, and a great deal of local government time in preparing for competitive bids, some of which are unsuccessful. Has not the design been unfortunate? Would it not be better for the Government to do something about devolving spending decisions to local government in a much more thorough way?
Recall Petitions: Voter ID
Lord Wallace of Saltaire Excerpts(1 year, 6 months ago)
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Baroness Scott of Bybrook (Con)
My noble friend is right. We are very encouraged by the first interim report from the Electoral Commission, but there is a lot more work to be done. It was only an interim analysis; the final analysis will be published in the autumn. The Government are looking both qualitatively and quantitatively at the May elections, and the report will be out by the end of November. When we get those reviews, we need to see if any changes need to be made, including on voter ID and young people.
Lord Wallace of Saltaire (LD)
My Lords, many constituencies have several hundred overseas voters; some have over 1,000. The extension of overseas voting rights would increase those numbers very considerably. What arrangements do the Government have in hand to make sure that, in the event of a recall petition in a constituency, its overseas voters are informed in a timely fashion so that they can participate?
Baroness Scott of Bybrook (Con)
My Lords, there will be a lot of changes in respect of overseas voters. I will have to write to the noble Lord on recall petitions.
Elections: Voter ID
Lord Wallace of Saltaire Excerpts(1 year, 7 months ago)
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Baroness Williams of Trafford (Con)
My Lords, it is the turn of the Liberal Democrats.
Lord Wallace of Saltaire (LD)
My Lords, we already have a problem with fewer young people turning out to vote than others. The clear implication of what Jacob Rees-Mogg said was that this was intended to discourage more young people from voting, but it ended up discouraging some older people from voting as well. Would not one of the easiest things be to expand the number of possible means of identification that young people could present when voting, and make it clear that that is being relaxed?
Baroness Scott of Bybrook (Con)
We will look at the evidence of that. We have said we that we will look at other forms of identification when we have the evidence to do so; that is what the Government will do.
UK Citizens Resident Overseas: Verification
Lord Wallace of Saltaire Excerpts(1 year, 10 months ago)
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Lord Wallace of Saltaire
To ask His Majesty’s Government what steps they are taking to ensure that the identity and integrity of (1) electoral registration, (2) voting, and (3) political donations, by citizens resident overseas are verified as carefully as those from citizens resident in the United Kingdom.
The Parliamentary Under-Secretary of State, Department for Levelling Up, Housing & Communities (Baroness Scott of Bybrook) (Con)
My Lords, the Elections Act 2022 delivered on the Government’s commitment to protect the integrity of our elections. In the future, as now, a British citizen living overseas who wishes to register as an overseas elector will need to have their identity and their connection to a relevant UK address established before they can be added to the register. The Act also introduced sensible safeguards for postal and proxy voting, and extended the secrecy of the ballot to postal voting. Political parties can accept donations only from registered electors, whether resident in the UK or overseas.
Lord Wallace of Saltaire (LD)
My Lords, the Minister will confirm that we are talking about an additional 1 million to 2 million voters from the extension of the timescale for overseas voters. That is 2,000 to 3,000 voters on average per constituency. This is significant. The Elections Act did indeed toughen up verification for domestic voters but it made no such arrangement for overseas voters. The local electoral registration officers I have spoken to say they will find verification extremely difficult for people who have not lived here for 20 years or more. Furthermore, the FCDO has said that it will play no role through embassies and consulates in verifying overseas voters’ identities. How can we be sure that those who register, vote and above all give donations from Dubai, Hong Kong, Singapore or the British Virgin Islands are who they say they are, that the money comes from them and that they are not acting on behalf of a hostile third party?
Baroness Scott of Bybrook (Con)
My Lords, it is inaccurate to suggest that there will not be appropriate checks in place for the registration of overseas electors. In future, as now, a British citizen living overseas who wishes to register as an overseas elector will need to have their identity and their connection to a relevant UK address established before they can be added to the register. Currently, overseas applicants provide their date of birth and their national insurance number to be matched against DWP data. Failing this, if an overseas applicant’s identity cannot be verified by a DWP check, a new step will be introduced before the attestation stage, whereby an applicant must supply documentary evidence for an ERO to verify their identity. I cannot see the problem. As I have said in answer to previous questions, nobody can give money to any political party unless they are registered to elect in either this country or overseas.
The Union (Constitution Committee Report)
Lord Wallace of Saltaire Excerpts(2 years ago)
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Lord Wallace of Saltaire (LD)
My Lords, I am a mongrel Scots-Englishman, with a father who served in a Highland regiment and a son in Edinburgh, so I am a natural unionist. However, it is clear that, if we are to maintain the United Kingdom, its constitutional arrangements must change. We should face the real possibility that we might not maintain the union.
As I came in today, I was thinking of the conference that took place in Prague in 1990, in which one of the Czechoslovak participants said, “I am Czech but my brother has decided he is a Slovak.” I remember, two or three years later, teaching students from what had been Yugoslavia—many were struggling with deciding whether they were a Bosnian, a Croat or a Serb, and feeling, as one of them said to me, “orphaned” by the collapse of the state.
The electoral system that we have at the moment accentuates the difficulties of holding the union together. We have, based on roughly half the population of Scotland, a phalanx of SNP MPs in the House and an underrepresentation of the other currents in Scottish opinion. We have a Conservative Government dominated by southern England, a Labour Party that represents Wales and the north, and a further party—mine—that hangs on to bits of south-west London, bits of north-east Scotland and wherever else we can manage in our electoral system to get through. That accentuates the problem, and I fear that, if we were to have another five years of Conservative Government, the union would break.
I want to talk briefly about chapter 7, on the governance of England, and chapter 3, on parliamentary sovereignty. This report rightly addresses the problem that England is the most overcentralised state in the democratic world and that it will be increasingly difficult to sustain the balance between England and the three devolved nations unless the governance of England is itself transformed. The political and economic imbalance within England is starkly portrayed by the betrayal of the grandiose promise of levelling up. Small packages of funding, distributed by Ministers according to opaque criteria, offer gestures from the centre without any sharing of power. I agree with the noble Lord, Lord Howarth, that there is a link here with public disillusionment in western politics and a sense of powerlessness, which I hear from friends and neighbours in West Yorkshire, when they say that “those people down in London” are neglecting Bradford, Leeds and the trans-Pennine rail route. That is all part of the disillusionment with our constitutional democracy.
I have lived between London and Yorkshire for 40 years and have witnessed the widening gap between London and the north, while local government has been weakened and shrunk through successive reorganisations, and local control of finance has shrivelled. The Government’s approach to the reorganisation of local government, as others have said in the debate, has been incoherent, with evident political bias in redesigning the shape and size of the new authorities and the powers that they are given. Almost every authority in Yorkshire and the majority of Yorkshire MPs stated their clear preference to maintain district authorities within a “One Yorkshire” regional authority. The Government nevertheless insisted on four sub-regions, each with an elected mayor but without an elected assembly to hold the mayor to account. London has a regional authority with local governments beneath it; the rest of England is denied that.
The regional centres of government that linked central departments to the concerns of the north-west, the south-west and elsewhere were abolished 12 years ago. The Government now think that sending contingents of civil servants to Durham or Lancashire to continue to carry out the instructions of Ministers in London amounts to some form of devolution. If they were to return to the regions and cities the powers that they held 50 years ago, the civil servants would, of course, naturally follow.
The Conservatives promised in their 2019 manifesto to set up a constitutional commission, but broke that pledge, like many others. I hope that the next Government will address the governance of England as a high priority. We will not succeed in reducing the acute inequalities between the south-east and the rest unless the political imbalance is redressed. As paragraph 267 of the report says:
“The devolution framework should include steps to achieve greater coherence in England’s sub-national governance arrangements to improve democratic accountability. We recommend the development of devolution within England should ensure greater alignment between subnational bodies to create functioning economic geographies which also respect local identities”.
Hear, hear. I agree strongly, and the Government are absolutely failing to do that.
A reformed second Chamber should play its part in this. Interparliamentary relations would work better if Members of the second Chamber were elected, directly or indirectly, on a national and regional basis, and saw it as their job to assert those regional and national concerns against the dominance of London. When I was appointed to this House, I hoped and assumed that I would make the transition from an appointee to an elected representative from Yorkshire when the next stage of reform brought us regional and national representation in the House. But Labour hesitancy on this, as on so many other issues, and Conservative opposition in the Commons, blocked the 2011-12 reform.
Lord Wallace of Saltaire (LD)
This report reminds us that we will have to return to that, in spite of the resistance of the noble Lord, Lord Cormack.
I welcome the noble Lord, Lord Verdirame. I hope that his expertise as an international lawyer will feed into our debates on the topic of sovereignty and its place in the constitution of a multinational state. Constitutional discussions in the UK are blighted by the undue reverence still given to the views on sovereignty of Albert Dicey, an academic whose interpretation of sovereignty was twisted by his embittered opposition to Irish home rule and his consequent insistence that sovereignty was indivisible and rested in the Government who held the confidence of the Imperial Parliament. Sovereignty in the contemporary world has to be shared—upward and downwards, as the noble Baroness, Lady Bryan, was saying—with other states, and with the constituent bodies of states. The ideologues who deny that sovereignty can be shared with our neighbours are the same people who resist sharing it with Wales, Scotland and Ireland. It is they who threaten to destroy our union, just as their great-grandparents destroyed the union between Great Britain and most of Ireland. That is a real threat, and we have to adapt our constitutional arrangements to prevent it.
Voter Identification Regulations 2022
Lord Wallace of Saltaire Excerpts(2 years, 1 month ago)
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Baroness Verma (Con)
My Lords, I spoke in Committee on the Elections Bill on this issue because I was offended then, and am still offended today, by the noble Baroness, Lady Pinnock, saying that black and ethnic minority communities will be marginalised and will not want to be part of this process. I have spoken to lots of people from my community and not one has said that they would be offended by having a voter ID card. To be quite frank, I agree with the Opposition Benches that a review to see how it works would be great, but I take offence at the point continuously being raised in this House that minority communities will somehow feel disenfranchised. We do not. Please take that away. We are citizens of this country and we will use our right, just like every other citizen.
Lord Wallace of Saltaire (LD)
My Lords, my local politics are in Bradford, where elections are often quite boisterous affairs, and in some cases threatening. I do not entirely accept the classification that the noble Baroness, Lady Verma, has made of what happens in elections; we have a very large community of Kashmiri origin, now in its third or fourth generation, in Bradford. Some are now extremely prosperous and others are still marginalised. We also have a very poor and marginalised white community in Bradford in a similar position, so it is a question of not just ethnic minorities but the poorest and most marginal council tenants in our society.
Baroness Verma (Con)
I also come from a very mixed community: the city of Leicester. We have very boisterous elections there too, but that does not stop people wanting to have something that will make it easier for them not to have those boisterous discussions.
Lord Wallace of Saltaire (LD)
I wanted briefly to make one other point. I am holding the National Security Bill, which we will discuss in Committee next week. Clause 14 and Schedule 1 are on foreign interference in British elections, and the Bill lists a number of offences that need to be considered in terms of foreign interference, including personation, proxy voting, postal voting fraud, sources of donations and others. Yet, in the Elections Act, we have extended overseas voting rights for British citizens from 15 years to a lifetime, without any serious checks on or verification of identity either for those who will give donations once they are on the register or for those who will use postal and proxy voting, which they of course have to do. I hope that, in Committee on the National Security Bill, the Minister will engage fully on the changes to the Elections Act that this will make necessary, because the gap between this emphasis on much greater verification and checks for voters who vote in person and the almost total absence of verification or checks for overseas voters is astonishing, is too wide and needs to be addressed.
Lord Browne of Belmont (DUP)
My Lords, the purpose of this regulation is to prevent election fraud, and the Minister quite rightly referred to the success in a similar situation in Northern Ireland. Before 2002, there was considerable fraud in elections there, and the election Act was therefore introduced. It was a challenge at the time, but, after a lot of discussion, there was agreement between all the parties to introduce the election fraud Act, which has proved very successful.
In Northern Ireland, the law requires electors to produce one of seven photographic identifications, including, for example, passports, driving licences and senior transport passes. But, in the argument today, some people say that this will exclude many people—but, in Northern Ireland, we have the electoral identity card, which is produced free of charge by the Electoral Office. This form of identification is acceptable to a very high proportion of the electorate in Northern Ireland. It excludes no one, and it is free. Before the election, vans go out to housing estates and different parts of society in Northern Ireland, producing this so that people can get it for free. It does not exclude people, so I do not accept the argument that people, perhaps from lower sections of the community, are excluded. This has been extremely successful in Northern Ireland, and the Minister referred to this success. So we should think very carefully, and we should introduce these regulations.
United Kingdom: The Union
Lord Wallace of Saltaire Excerpts(2 years, 7 months ago)
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Lord Wallace of Saltaire (LD)
My Lords, with the evolution of the three devolved Governments, the United Kingdom has become a very unbalanced and insecure centralised country. I mention in passing that the question of whether the UK includes the Crown dependencies is left deliberately ambiguous. The Council of the Isles was set up with representation from the Isle of Man, Jersey and Guernsey. The Procurement Bill with which we are currently dealing contains a clause that says that UK suppliers include suppliers from the Crown dependencies. However, I recall very well that the last commission on the constitution, in the 1970s, made it clear that the Crown dependencies are not part of the United Kingdom. I will leave that aside for this debate, although we will no doubt continue to address this, with all of the intricacies of tax avoidance that are involved.
The stresses upon the union are clearly growing, but I will talk mainly about the stresses being caused within England. In passing, I say that I am conscious that not all Conservatives below the leadership are still unionists: some English nationalists—the Ukippers of the Conservative Party—would be quite happy to see Scotland and Northern Ireland go, although they have not really thought about Wales. They think that it would save on tax transfers, but it would leave a very discontented north of England dominated by southern England and suffering as a result. That is not an impossible prospect, and we need to be very carefully aware of it.
Mention has been made of the Whitehall mindset, but it is also the ministerial mindset and what one has to call the Diceyan mindset—namely, that Parliament only temporarily devolves powers and may take them back whenever it feels like it. That is clearly not compatible with the continuation of the union. I keep reminding Ministers that Dicey wrote his doctrine on the constitution at the same time that he was writing violent pamphlets against any devolution to Ireland, and this clearly biased and influenced the way he wrote about UK sovereignty.
England has the most centralised democracy in the developed world. What is more, successive Governments muck about with local and regional structures. The Constitution Committee’s report on a stronger union says:
“we believe continued and frequent restructuring will risk undermining Whitehall’s capacity to manage a fundamental part of the United Kingdom’s governance arrangements.”
The latest example that I am aware of is the enforced dislocation of the governance of North Yorkshire by the abolition of district councils and the imposition of a single council, which means that some councillors will have to spend over two hours driving from the ward that they represent to the basic unit of local government to which they will now belong. I note that district councils still exist in Surrey, and I hope that they are about to be abolished in the same way; if the Government believe in single-tier local government, they have to impose it everywhere.
This change was made in the face of all but one of the 19 councils in Yorkshire saying clearly that they preferred an overall Yorkshire structure which would represent the clear identity of the region and its 5 million people—twice as many as in two of the three devolved Assemblies. This was overruled by the Government, with the imposition of metro mayors—some even wish to impose a metro mayor on North Yorkshire somehow. This is not a competent way to restructure local government or rebuild public trust in democracy as a whole, particularly when Governments mistrust metro mayors and very infrequently consult them on arrangements.
What do we need to do? We need to think hard about how we devolve powers within the dominant country of the United Kingdom. We need to think about how we make the necessary fiscal transfers much more transparent, and about how we build that into our union structures. I increasingly believe that the second Chamber should be based on representation of the nations and regions of the United Kingdom, which is part of what would build in the checks and balances of the United Kingdom as a whole. For the clearly neglected regions of England—they feel even more neglected now—it would also symbolise that they are represented and seen in this disunited country.
We must worry about Scotland and we have to worry about Northern Ireland, but we must not forget that there are many parts of England which are now fundamentally discontented with our current Government. No doubt the voters of Wakefield will demonstrate that today, but I read in the Financial Times yesterday a very good interview on the sense of betrayal at the abandonment of most of Northern Powerhouse Rail; at the refusal to build an underground station in Manchester even though they are building one at Old Oak Common; and at the abandonment on the grounds of cost of putting a new tunnel through the Pennines even though they are putting a large and much longer tunnel under the Chilterns for HS2. All those things build distrust and discontent at the local and regional level. This very southern-based Government need to be aware of that, and as we look at the problems of maintaining co-operation with the Scots, the Welsh and the Northern Irish, it should not be forgotten.