Ministerial Code: Policy Announcements

Lord Wallace of Saltaire Excerpts

Wednesday 30th October 2024 Lords Chamber

[The Parliamentary Under-Secretary of State, Department for Culture, Media and Sport (Baroness Twycross) (Lab)]

My Lords, the Government take their obligations to Parliament extremely seriously. As the Minister for the Cabinet Office said in the other place yesterday, the Speaker’s comments have been heard by Ministers across government, including in this House. As for Treasury Ministers making announcements in the other place, the Chief Secretary to the Treasury made an Oral Statement to Parliament on Monday about the fiscal rules and Treasury Ministers answered questions in the other place yesterday. Today, the Chancellor set out in Parliament the full details of the Budget, which will fix the foundations of our economy. Anyone who was watching the faces of the Opposition Front Bench will know that most of the measures were clearly a surprise. The leader of the Opposition seemed particularly glum as he looked at his phone for his revised lines.

[Lord Wallace of Saltaire (LD)]

My Lords, does the Minister understand why we on these Benches feel that we keep hearing the pot calling the kettle black? I note that, in the Commons, the Conservative spokesperson complained that the Labour Party was behaving just as badly as the Conservatives had. Perhaps I should admit that, during the coalition Government, George Osborne, as Chancellor, was heard to complain that Nick Clegg’s office briefed out all the juicy bits from the Budget before he had a chance to give his Budget speech—so everyone does it to a certain amount. Does the Minister accept that the idea that everything in the Budget should be unknown beforehand and sprung immediately on Parliament is perhaps not the best way to handle financial and spending planning in today’s complicated environment, and that that is one of the things the new Government should be reconsidering, in consultation with the other parties?

[Baroness Twycross (Lab)]

This party and the Government understand our obligations to Parliament and take them extremely seriously, but I note the noble Lord’s points. As the Minister for the Cabinet Office said in the other place, we have heard what the Speaker said, and all Ministers are very clear about their responsibility to the other place and, on this Front Bench, to your Lordships’ House.

Statutory Instruments (Amendment) Bill [HL]

Lord Wallace of Saltaire Excerpts

2nd reading
Friday 18th October 2024 Lords Chamber

[Lord Wallace of Saltaire (LD)]

My Lords, this is a modest but constructive proposal for a change in the way in which Parliament and the Government interact. I very much hope that the Government will welcome it and give it their support or take it forward in some other way. We are talking about balance: the very important balance between Parliament and the Executive, and the equally important balance between primary and secondary legislation.

There is a major underlying principle that I have become more and more irritated about during my years in this House. One hears people talking about the principle of parliamentary sovereignty—how that is the foundation of our constitution—but the reality, we all know, is prime ministerial sovereignty, Executive dominance and “elective dictatorship”, as a former Lord Hailsham described it when in opposition. He of course did not think that way when in government. I noticed that on the Conservative Front Benches only a week ago the noble Lord, Lord True, said, in effect, that this Government were behaving like an elective dictatorship. It is not something he would have been saying a few months ago.

One sees a new Government coming in and one hopes that the quality of governance will improve. So far, the signs are not good. One sees Ministers wishing to rush ahead with a whole set of proposals. One sees reports that Labour Whips are telling their MPs that under no circumstances are they to vote against any government proposals. That does not have much to do with parliamentary sovereignty.

What we saw under the last Government was a situation in which primary legislation got more and more like skeleton Bills, secondary and tertiary legislation increased and, as Ministers came and went every six to nine months, the belief that they should act immediately and push something else through meant that we had inconsistent policies and, frankly, increasingly bad government. Good government is slow and considered government, with rationales for what is being proposed and with impact assessments.

The Bill proposes that the Government should be willing to think again and that, when there is secondary legislation, some mechanism should be provided to make the Commons and the Government think again. I remind the Minister that the Delegated Powers and Regulatory Reform Committee’s report says:

“The abuse of delegated powers is in effect an abuse of Parliament and an abuse of democracy”.


We are not talking here about the primacy of the Commons; we are talking about the fundamental importance of parliamentary scrutiny for democracy in holding the Government to account.

The second report said that,

“if because of modern conditions Parliament is being asked to accept new ways of legislating, then it is surely right that the Government must stand ready to accept new methods of scrutiny”.

So I ask the Minister: will the Government accept that we need to change the rules? Do they also accept that that has to be done by primary legislation? Or do they agree with the comments of the Hansard Society that this could be done by changing the Standing Orders of both Houses? In which case, would the Minister agree to look into that and see how quickly it might be done?

Procurement Act 2023

Lord Wallace of Saltaire Excerpts

Tuesday 15th October 2024 Lords Chamber

[Baroness Twycross (Lab)]

I can only agree with my noble friend.

[Lord Wallace of Saltaire (LD)]

My Lords, does the Minister recall that, when the Procurement Act was first presented—it started in the Lords—it was one of the most badly drafted Bills I have ever seen, and that the Government themselves produced 350 amendments between Second Reading and Committee? Do the Government intend to look again at the rules covering outsourcing, particularly to companies which have in the past made excessive profits from government contracts?

[Baroness Twycross (Lab)]

I will look into that matter and write to the noble Lord on that point.

Public Sector Productivity

Lord Wallace of Saltaire Excerpts

Wednesday 9th October 2024 Lords Chamber

[Lord Wallace of Saltaire (LD)]

My Lords, I want to talk about morale as an important part of improving the productivity of the Civil Service, about digital transformation and, above all, about training.

The noble Baroness, Lady Neville-Rolfe, talked about culture as important. One thing that I saw when I was in the coalition Government was the cultural problem of the relationship between Ministers and officials and the cultural assumption that some Ministers had—quite a lot of Ministers in the Conservative Party—that civil servants were lazy and inefficient and therefore were to be insulted. I recall vividly a meeting at which there were several Permanent Secretaries and a senior Conservative Minister who started by saying what he thought of the Civil Service and how useless they were. Then, afterwards, he was rather surprised that the Permanent Secretaries had not been particularly sympathetic to the criticisms and proposals that he was making.

When we have one of the two candidates left fighting for the leadership of the Conservative Party talking about 10% of the Civil Service needing to be put in prison, we are dealing with a culture in which you are unlikely to motivate civil servants to do things that you would like. I hope that this Government will treat the Civil Service with a great deal more respect.

I also hope that Ministers will stay in office for longer. The most depressing thing that I have heard in this context in the past few days is the suggestion that the Government might push through a ministerial reshuffle after six months. Civil servants whom I know— I used to teach people who then went into the Civil Service—spoke to me about how awful it is when you have a new Minister and then, nine months later, he or she is gone and another one comes in who is either too arrogant to bother to learn about the subject or too slow to want to learn. A number of the best officials whom I worked with in government have since left. Of course, another reason why they have left is that the gap between Civil Service pay and outside pay has grown too wide. That is one reason why it was right to increase the pay of senior civil servants. I speak with passion on this because a member of my family left the Civil Service two years ago and is now earning about 40% more than what she was earning as a senior civil servant. If you have that gap, as with teachers and with junior doctors, retention becomes a problem.

On the digital dimension, we have fallen a long way behind. That is, again, partly a failure of government. I was very sorry to see in the Times this morning the attack on Mike Bracken after he was appointed as a director at HMRC. I worked with him when he was head of the Government Digital Service and was attempting to drive a digital transformation earlier in Whitehall. That failed partly because he did not get the support of senior Ministers and because each department fought its own territory. We need people like him who will push forward a digital transformation in Whitehall—the sort of thing that gets rid of those who have to work with paper—and make databases link across Whitehall. It is not an area in which I am expert, but it is clear that there are substantial productivity gains to be made.

However, I really want to talk about training and the failure that we have seen on training in the last seven to 15 years. I declare an interest in that my wife trained civil servants in the early years of the Civil Service College. I too worked some 25 years ago on the top management course, which was a wonderful team-building course for senior civil servants. One of the things that happened in 2010—I regret that the Liberal Democrats failed to stop it—was that the National School of Government was abolished and Sunningdale sold off. Civil Service Learning was left online—indeed, an online campus was developed. I heard very critical remarks from my former students about how useless this was. Of course, it was outsourced, first to Capita and then to KPMG and EY. The Government have just extended the KPMG contract for another £223 million, on the assumption that KPMG in turn will subcontract, having taken on others for delivery. This is waste and inefficiency. If one is serious about training civil servants, one needs to rebuild the capacity within government which can help to give a sense of corporate responsibility, team-building and the professional skills that we need. If we restore morale, sustain ministerial leadership, drive forward investment in digital transformation and rebuild training, we will have a much more productive Civil Service.

Whitehall: Prioritising Performance

Lord Wallace of Saltaire Excerpts

Tuesday 10th September 2024 Lords Chamber

[Baroness Twycross (Lab)]

All of us have probably come across points at which people are treated as almost indispensable. Part of the value of people stepping back and having a report of this kind is that we can focus on what those critical single points of failure are. I will feed back the noble Baroness’s comments to the relevant Minister.

[Lord Wallace of Saltaire (LD)]

My Lords, the Minister mentioned that retention of the exceptionally talented is a problem. I have been distressed in the last five years to discover that some of the most talented civil servants I worked with in the coalition have given up and left the Civil Service, partly because of the rapid turnover of Ministers, partly because of the way in which some Ministers treated their officials, and also because a number of Ministers always seemed to prefer advice from consultants to that from civil servants. In that context, can the Minister explain why the Government have just given—perhaps she inherited the idea from her predecessor—a £200 million contract to KPMG to train civil servants? To my knowledge, KPMG is not particularly expert in training governmental officials, and it would be much cheaper and more effective to ask the university sector to train civil servants instead. I declare an interest as I used, as a university academic, to train civil servants.

[Baroness Twycross (Lab)]

This is not an issue that I have got specific details on. I will go back and ask about it, but I assume that this would have been subject to a pretty rigorous procurement process.

Economic Activity of Public Bodies (Overseas Matters) Bill

Lord Wallace of Saltaire Excerpts

Committee stage
Tuesday 14th May 2024 Lords Chamber

[Lord Warner (CB)]

My Lords, I intervene very briefly as a person who benefits very considerably from a local government pension scheme; indeed, pretty much my whole income comes from one. One thing that always concerned me and colleagues who were in these schemes was that they were well run, that their management was good, that they were reliable and that our deferred income—which is what a pension scheme is using—was being looked after well. What I hear from these amendments that are being spoken to in this group is that we need to strengthen the Bill if we are to continue with well-run pension schemes.

I also rather agree with the point made by the noble Lord, Lord Davies of Brixton, that it is very difficult to see what the case is for treating public authority schemes separately from private schemes—but that is a debate for another part of the Bill.

Here we should really be accepting technical amendments endorsed by the noble and learned Lord, Lord Thomas, the noble Lord, Lord Willetts, and in particular the noble Baroness, Lady Drake, which it seems to me would improve the confidence of beneficiaries of these schemes that the reliable management of the schemes would not be damaged.

[Lord Wallace of Saltaire (LD)]

My Lords, I should declare an interest as a beneficiary of the university superannuation scheme. Can the Minister remind us how many times any local government pension fund has taken decisions on political and ethical grounds towards investment in particular foreign countries? The Explanatory Notes to the Bill give us a very small number of examples of where local government pension funds have discussed whether they should. We will come later to the question of whether we should ban discussions of these sorts in a free country, but that is different. I worry about whether we are having an enormous debate about something which has not happened in this country and is unlikely to happen in this country. It happens in the United States, and the American debate filters into this country. Particularly on the right in British politics we have an awful tendency to pick up American partisan politics and try to apply them over here, which I am deeply unhappy about. Is this a real problem or a manufactured, confected problem? If so, could we possibly leave it aside until some future date when it perhaps becomes a problem?

[Baroness Janke (LD)]

My Lords, I also belatedly declare my interest as a beneficiary of the Local Government Pension Scheme.

Economic Activity of Public Bodies (Overseas Matters) Bill

Lord Wallace of Saltaire Excerpts

Committee stage
Tuesday 14th May 2024 Lords Chamber

I sympathise with what the noble Lord, Lord Hendy, is trying to do and I hope there may be other ways of achieving the objective of really beefing up the labour-related misconduct provision in the Bill, which I too think is inadequate—but I am not sure that Amendment 32, as it currently stands, would work.

[Lord Wallace of Saltaire (LD)]

My Lords, there is no one on the Liberal Democrat Benches tonight who is sufficiently expert in international law to intervene at length in this debate, so I will be very brief.

I read the discussions from the last evening we met—I apologise that I was unavoidably away—and I note the argument made that international law is not simply the law but a broad network of treaties, conventions and agreements to which the UK has become a party. Much of it was drafted in the formative years after the Second World War by British lawyers—Conservative British lawyers, under Conservative Governments—in which we played, as Ministers still like to say, a leading role. Some of us are now quite nervous that there are some elements within the current Conservative Party, some of whom are in government, who are not particularly committed to maintaining our established reputation as a staunch upholder of international law.

We on these Benches would suggest that the Government take back paragraphs 6 and 8 of the Schedule, take into account the criticisms that the noble Lord, Lord Verdirame, and others have made, and consider how we can ensure that these are strengthened and clearer, so that we can all agree that there is nothing in the Bill that encourages denigration of international law. All those involved in taking investment decisions should be quite clear that, in dealing with overseas investments, the framework of international law is one that should always be considered and accepted.

[Lord Warner (CB)]

My Lords, I intervene briefly, not because I am an expert on international law but because I have a great sense of déjà vu about the way this debate is opening up by comparison with the previous debate. The issue seems to be the creation of uncertainty about what the law means. That was the issue dominating the previous debate: that the trustees of pension schemes would be left in a state of uncertainty if we did not put clearer language in the Bill. This debate is starting to go through the same process but in another area, where there could be uncertainty about what people do in interpreting this legislation before they make their decisions. We are opening up issues that the Government need to attend to, to make sure that the Bill is clear to the people who will be required to implement it.

--- Later in debate ---

[The Lord Bishop of Manchester]

My Lords, I support this amendment and the stand part notice, to which I have added my name. I declare again my interest that as a bishop I can, in certain circumstances, be deemed to be a public body in my own right. I can also assure your Lordships that I have no acquisitive designs on any noble Baroness’s handbag this evening.

Clause 4 represents an attack on free speech. It prohibits even statements that suggest a person would have acted differently had it been legal to do so, even if they make it clear that they are going to act within the confines of the law. It is hard—as the noble Baroness just said—to see this as anything other than a sizeable infringement on that basic right to free speech, which is a cornerstone of our democracy.

Your Lordships will not be surprised that I oppose that restriction as a matter of principle. Free speech should be limited only when it is absolutely essential in order to prevent some very grave harm. I have heard nothing to date to suggest that such grave harm is likely to arise. If the Minister or her colleague has an example—perhaps in the aforementioned handbag— I plead with her to share it with us tonight.

Having taken a matter of principle, let me now set out why I believe the clause also contains important practical challenges. The Local Government Association has labelled this clause as particularly problematic. The Government say in the Explanatory Notes that councillors are not prohibited from expressing support—including in minutes—but if that is so, why is it not clearly in the Bill? Why not just remove this problematic clause?

Aside from the moral qualms that we might have about limits on freedom of speech, it is difficult to see how this clause could be enforced. It makes councillors particularly vulnerable to challenge when we elect them to give their opinions; they have to be free to do so. I also know, from having served for a good number of years as the independent chair of a local authority standards committee, that it is not always clear when the elected member is acting on behalf of a council or on their own behalf. Noble Lords may well remember one famous case where this distinction lay at the heart of it, involving the person who was at that time the Mayor of London. Mayors are of course public bodies in their own right, and that entire case, at the various levels it went through, hung on whether at that time he was acting as the Mayor of London or simply as a private individual going about his own business.

We heard at Second Reading the concerns that this will create a culture in which difficult ethical discussions do not take place, because of fears that this clause might be brought into action. Later this year, we are going to have a general election, I believe. Many candidates in that election may also serve on local government bodies. It would be invidious to our democracy for a candidate not to be able to answer honestly a question raised at a hustings, or by a journalist, out of fear that action might somehow then follow under this clause.

I have focused on local authority members, but we have spent many hours already in Committee discussing the uncertainty as to who exactly constitutes a public authority or a public body, or even whether those two terms mean the same thing. If we end up with university authorities being so classified, do we really wish to fetter the free speech that lies at the heart of healthy academic institutions—in fact, the free speech of which, on just about every other occasion we have discussed it in this House, I have always felt this Government to be a strong supporter? The only way to avoid such a culture of intimidation, which I am sure we all agree would be detrimental to local democracy, and potentially to wider civic and public life, is to remove this clause altogether.

[Lord Wallace of Saltaire (LD)]

My Lords, I have been trying to think of the right reverend Prelate as a public body. He is certainly a public authority, but he is at most a hybrid public body. I am not quite sure what sort of hybrid he is in this respect.

My name is on Amendment 33 and the clause stand part notice. I make it clear that this entire clause should go. The exact phrase in the Conservative Party manifesto in 2019 was:

“We will ban public bodies from imposing their own direct or indirect boycotts, disinvestment or sanctions campaigns against foreign countries”.


There was nothing about what they say there, although I note that the department’s memorandum for us says:

“It is intended that the measures will be widely construed”.


This is widely construed to the degree of being ambiguous and imprecise, as so much of this badly drafted Bill clearly is.

Yesterday I ran into the noble Lord, Lord Frost, in the corridor and commented on his rather good article, which was in the Telegraph on Friday, on freedom of speech as fundamental to the Conservative Party. I then asked him what he thought about Clause 4 of this Bill. He looked at me in some confusion and said, “I thought that had been withdrawn already”. I wish that that thought was a precursor of the change.

I have found it difficult to find arguments in support of the clause. I looked through the Commons Public Bill Committee stage, where evidence was taken from the legal adviser to the Free Speech Union, who said:

“My position is that clause 4 really needs to go in its entirety … there is no need—I think it is not necessary either politically or perhaps even legally—to prohibit statements. The mischief that is to be prohibited is the threatened act … This Bill very clearly targets expressions of political and moral conscience, which is to say the form of expression that is most highly protected by article 10””.—[Official Report, Commons, Economic Activity of Public Bodies (Overseas Matters) Bill Committee, 5/9/23; cols. 38-39.]


of the European Convention on Human Rights. It is not just the European Convention; we go back to the Atlantic charter, the fundamental basis on which the post-war international order rested, drafted by British diplomats, and in which the four freedoms include freedom of speech and freedom of belief.

I note that, in the Commons stages, one Conservative MP, David Jones, said:

“This is a Conservative Government. Conservatives believe in and value free speech … This is a deeply un-Conservative measure and I believe that the amendment”—


to Clause 4—

“is right and that the provision should go”.—[Official Report, Commons, 25/10/23; col. 915.]

The Committee should take that seriously. In the Commons debates, another Conservative MP referred to this clause and the ones that follow as introducing the concept of “thought crime”.

The Constitution Committee of this House’s very critical report says:

“The protection of free speech is a fundamental right. In our view, clauses 4(1)(a) and 4(1)(b) unduly limit freedom of speech … The House may wish to consider whether clause 4 should be removed from the Bill”.


I dare to suggest to the Minister that this House will reject this clause and that, when the Bill returns to the Commons, it is quite possible that a number of Conservative MPs who do believe in conservative values of free speech will find it convenient not to be there when the Commons vote again. Therefore, it would be wise for the Government to consider their position and, I suggest, withdraw this clause.

[Lord Warner (CB)]

My Lords, the noble Baroness, Lady Chapman, was kind about my previous speech and almost enticed me to get up and go over some of this ground again. When I spoke on Amendment 19, I was concerned about the statement of compliance with the Human Rights Act that the Minister had signed in the Bill. I probably took my eye off the ball a little by going for that rather than Clause 4 directly. But I said that the reason for the non-compliance was the presence of Clause 4 in the Bill, which was clearly in breach of Article 10 of the ECHR. I asked the Minister to cite the Government’s legal advice that justified that statement of compliance. I was given the usual answer from Government Front Benches, that the Government do not reveal their legal advice.

After that event, I turned my attention, as the noble Lord, Lord Wallace, did, to the Constitution Committee’s report, which is an interesting document. Paragraph 5 says, in bold type, that this clause is in contravention of the ECHR. It does not mince its words; it says it clearly and unequivocally. It is worth looking at the make-up of the Constitution Committee. It has 12 members, five of whom are distinguished lawyers. It has a former Lord Chief Justice, a former Lord Chancellor and three eminent King’s Counsels. It also has a former Conservative Leader of this House: the noble Lord, Lord Strathclyde. The Minister was reticent about quoting the Government’s legal advice, but I am not at all reticent about citing the source of my legal advice: the Constitution Committee.

I can see no grounds why this Government should continue with this gagging clause when a very eminent set of lawyers on the Constitution Committee has said, in words of one syllable, that this is a breach of Article 10 of the ECHR. I will not go back over the ground about the statement of compliance—the issue is clear cut. It is that we remove this gagging clause, which is an impediment to free speech.

--- Later in debate ---

[Baroness Noakes (Con)]

My Lords, as a Conservative, I believe absolutely in the right to freedom of speech, but I do not think that the limits on freedom of speech in Clause 4 are as great as some noble Lords have tried to make out. I do not think that Article 10 of the European Convention on Human Rights is something that affects the rights of individuals, and Clause 4 is fundamentally aimed at public authorities. I completely understand that there is a very small number of public authorities who can be individuals as well, but, as my noble friend the Minister explained at Second Reading and as the Explanatory Notes make very clear, the prohibition on statements is against public authorities and attaches to individuals only to the extent that they are speaking for the public authority. Even if it applies to the statements made by individuals on behalf of the public authority, the ban applies to the public authority and the enforcement action is taken against the public authority. So individuals are not targeted by Clause 4.

We have to remember that this is not an academic issue. We already know that councils are starting to pass BDS motions and they are against this Bill. We know that the student encampments are including demands or public statements on the conflict in the Middle East and on divestment. They may not get all their demands, but that is certainly where they are pushing towards. Without the Bill, I think we can be fairly sure that BDS activities and statements will continue to increase and that will have an impact on social cohesion, and a particular impact on the Jewish communities that are affected by the sorts of statements that are made.

[Lord Wallace of Saltaire (LD)]

The noble Baroness said that she is afraid that BDS statements will increase. Is she in favour of preventing such statements in unavoidably lively public debate?

[Baroness Noakes (Con)]

Yes, I am against statements being made by public authorities. I am trying to make the distinction at the moment between public authorities and the individuals who are involved in those public authorities, who I think are hardly affected by this, except to the extent that they speak for the public authority. I think there is a case for taking a position against statements by public authorities, because of the impact on social cohesion.

We have to remember that this provision does not come from nowhere: it is rooted in the real, live example of what happened in Leicester Council back in 2014. It passed a BDS motion and then said, “only as far as legal considerations allow”. At that time, that was hugely divisive in the local community. It does cause very real harm and that is why this is so different from the kind of example that the noble Baroness, Lady Chapman, gave at the beginning, about wanting to make a statement about stealing my noble friend’s excellent handbag. This is about social cohesion, at the end of the day; that is why this provision is in here.

--- Later in debate ---

[Baroness Neville-Rolfe (Con)]

I note the point that the noble Baroness has made. We did reply to the Constitution Committee, but I will reflect further on this point.

My noble friend Lady Noakes said that there had been some confusion due to the use of the term “person”, which I have already referred to. To respond to the point raised by the noble Lord, Lord Hendy, in the context of this clause, the legal term “person” refers only to a person subject to this Bill’s ban. In other words, it refers only to a public authority as defined in Section 6 of the Human Rights Act 1998. The legal term “person” does not have the same meaning as in normal English. This is standard legal drafting.

Additionally, for the purposes of this Bill, decision-makers are public authorities—as explained by my noble friend Lady Noakes and confirmed in Clause 2(1) of the Bill, which I have just referred to. Public authorities will delegate decision-making to individuals, but individuals’ decisions or statements are captured only when they are made on behalf of the public authority. This issue was also discussed in Committee in the other place. It was because we listened to the concerns raised on this point that we revised paragraphs 32 and 33 of the Explanatory Notes. Paragraph 32 states:

“As only public authorities are subject to clause 1, this clause is strictly limited to the actions of public authorities”


and therefore not individuals associated with public authorities. I think that goes three-quarters of the way to answering the question asked by the noble Baroness, Lady Chapman, but I will follow up.

I hope that makes it clear that this Bill is not an assault or restriction on the principle of free speech. Rather, it aims to ensure that the UK speaks with one voice internationally. Public authorities should not be pursuing their own foreign policy agenda or publishing statements on foreign policy. It distracts from their core duties. Clause 4 will support those bodies to remain focused on that purpose. It is a core part of the Bill and meets the manifesto commitment to ban public bodies from imposing their own direct or indirect boycott, divestment or sanctions campaigns against countries and territories.

Briefly to address Amendment 33, and the point raised by the noble Baroness, Lady Chapman, I remind the Committee of just how divisive of community cohesion within the United Kingdom declarations of intent to boycott can be. That includes statements made by public authorities that indicate that they would intend to participate in boycotts and divestments if it were legal to do so. The right reverend Prelate the Bishop of Manchester, who I am very glad has joined our discussions, will have noted what I said about elected officials, including councillors, expressing a view which is not related to the narrow purpose of this Bill. He asked for an example of our concern. We saw a good example in Leicester, which my noble friend Lady Noakes referred to. In its resolution in 2014, Leicester City Council passed a motion targeting the activity of the Israeli state with a boycott

“insofar as legal considerations allow”.

The motion was widely condemned by Jewish groups and was extremely divisive. This demonstrates the need to ban statements of intent to boycott or divest which express—

[Lord Wallace of Saltaire (LD)]

My Lords, we need to be very careful about how we talk about social cohesion at present. As it happens, I spent some time last weekend in Saltaire, which is part of the Bradford local authority, talking with one of Yorkshire’s Christian leaders and one of Yorkshire’s Muslim leaders about how we maintain social cohesion and interfaith co-operation under the current circumstances. It is not easy. These are two people whom I like and trust, and they are very good friends. We have to recognise the impact of the ongoing war, and in particular the response of our younger generation—white and Christian, and south Asian and Muslim—in all their diversity. It is very delicate at present, and simply asserting that stopping debate is a way to maintain social cohesion is not the answer.

[Baroness Neville-Rolfe (Con)]

As the noble Lord knows, the Bill aims to improve the situation with social cohesion. I note what he said, but we have seen examples of councils, such as Islington, passing motions in opposition to the Bill alongside foreign policy statements about Israel and other countries. While this might not be a breach of the ban, it demonstrates a strong interest in public authorities engaging in BDS campaigns. It could demonstrate that the Bill is already be having its intended effect of preventing public authorities making divisive statements.

The point is that, overall, Clause 4 supports the main aims of the Bill in ensuring that the UK speaks with one voice internationally and has one foreign policy agenda, and that public bodies do not introduce policies in that area that risk dividing communities at this difficult time. Accordingly, for this evening, I kindly ask the noble Baroness to withdraw her amendment.

Permanent Secretaries: Appointment and Removal (Constitution Committee Report)

Lord Wallace of Saltaire Excerpts

Thursday 9th May 2024 Grand Committee

[Lord Wallace of Saltaire (LD)]

My Lords, this small gathering of experts interested in this subject brings back for me happy memories of standing in the office of Mr Maude, as he then was, with his special adviser, as she then was, arguing about the future of the Civil Service and waiting for Permanent Secretaries to come in and argue with us, in what, the current Prime Minister tells us, was the chaotic situation of the coalition Government—which has been succeeded since then by the sound, single-party Government that we now have.

Of course, we are talking about the exceptional circumstances of the past five to seven years, with the astonishing turnover of Prime Ministers—two of whom, Boris Johnson and Liz Truss, behaved in an extraordinary way—and part of our question is how far we can regard that, in retrospect, as an exceptional circumstance that will not recur or as something which we have to respond to and build future defences against. The noble Lord, Lord Young, reminded us that sofa government under the Blair Administration had some characteristics that were not dissimilar; some of us go back as far as Margaret Thatcher’s constant questioning—“Is he one of us?”—in relation to civil servants as well as others. So this is not entirely new and I am not sure that we want to go all the way back to the period when Crossman, as some will remember, had a Permanent Secretary with whom he absolutely could not get on but with whom he was stuck and who was a powerful personality herself. We have to adapt to change to some circumstances.

Clearly, the situation under Liz Truss and Boris Johnson was exceptional. The war on experts, or “the blob”—Michael Gove clearly regarded most of the Civil Service, as well as the BBC, universities, journalism and various other things as part of the dreadful blob to be killed—biased the debate about the role of the Civil Service.

I note that, in paragraph 124 of the report, the noble Lord, Lord Macpherson, is quoted as saying that, under the Truss Government,

“you had to tell them what they wanted to hear”.

I recall a civil servant telling me that, when Liz Truss was the head of his department, you were told that you were supposed to give her only the good news when you went into a ministerial meeting. They said that senior civil servants who might be responsible for what was being discussed were excluded if they provided opinions on what was being said that were too critical. Clearly, that is also exceptional.

We know that Dominic Cummings behaved as no special adviser should ever behave. I have been told that, on occasion, he would summon senior civil servants from other departments to see him, without informing their Secretary of State or their private office.

We have to hope that all of that exceptional behaviour is now in the past, but we must recognise that we face longer-term problems of constant short-term policy-making, failure to sustain major projects over a long period, and failures of strategic planning or foresight. We also have to recognise that those come, perhaps, from deeper and shared weaknesses among the Civil Service, Ministers and Parliament. In that case, we would have a much broader agenda for constitutional reform, which we cannot debate now.

We have to recognise that the rate of ministerial churn has been as much of a problem as that of Civil Service churn. I recall another civil servant telling me that, in three years in one post, she had four Secretaries of State and three Ministers of State. That makes constant changes of policy rather difficult to cope with. The relationship between Ministers and the Civil Service has to be based on respect for evidence and on the constructive tension that follows from those who talk about the evidence and the problems of implementation and those who talk about their preferences and their desirability to change the way in which things are done.

This raises questions about the role of Ministers—again, they are perhaps questions for another Constitution Committee inquiry—and whether Ministers also need rather more training than they receive, and whether changes of government ought to take place not over three days but over at least two weeks, to give some chance for parliamentarians, who in many cases have no previous ministerial experience, to learn a bit about what they are taking on, how to treat the Civil Service, how to run Whitehall and so on.

I should say this about ministerial roles. I used to work at Chatham House, in the 1980s, and therefore worked closely with the Foreign Office. I recall the devotion with which senior and junior officials in the Foreign Office talked about their Secretary of State, Geoffrey Howe, and the sheer sadness that so many of them expressed when he left. Relations between Ministers and officials can be close and can be very much a matter of mutual respect. We have lost that in too many cases recently; that is as much a matter of the deterioration of our politics as of our Administration, I am afraid.

If we want to get really good Permanent Secretaries and maintain them, we have to recognise that, as the report suggests, the complexities of Permanent Secretaries’ roles make previous experience of the Civil Service highly desirable. That also suggests that, if you want a broader range of experience, career paths that go in and out of the Civil Service are highly desirable. I like the suggestion that there should be a stronger alumni network for those who have Civil Service experience and have gone out; I think that that is mentioned in the Institute for Government’s report, which a number of us have clearly already read.

We certainly need to do more training for senior officials. I used to teach the top management course—which I suspect the noble Lord, Lord Maude, abolished, although I am not sure about that. I recall meeting civil servants who had been sent to INSEAD, and I think the idea of sending civil servants off to courses such as that is highly desirable. Those are all things which we hope a new Government will wish to take on board.

We have to take salaries on board as well, and we also need to recognise the sheer complexities of being a civil servant. Sir John Kingman is quoted in the Institute for Government’s report as saying that what you need is

“sufficiently dispassionate—and resigned”

attitudes

“to accept and adapt to the changing whims of successive ministers”.

That is a bit hard, but I understand what he means.

I recall a good friend in the Foreign Office who resigned and became headmaster of a public school. I asked him why on earth he had done so, and he said, “Well, I found when I was going to the cinema, William, I was crying too often. I was just having to suppress too many of my own preferences and emotions in order to sustain the neutrality of a civil servant”.

The final thing I want to refer to is the Institute for Government’s suggestion that fostering

“a national culture of contributing to government”

is a way to rebuild respect for the Civil Service and the morale of the Civil Service. If we want to maintain a competent Civil Service, with people coming through to the top who are of the top quality, we have got to shift away from the position in which the mainstream media, and too often politicians on all sides, blame the Civil Service. We should ask for that to stop and for the Civil Service to be valued properly. That is perhaps as hopeless as asking for the second Chamber, the House of Lords in its current composition, to be valued properly as well.

Economic Activity of Public Bodies (Overseas Matters) Bill

Lord Wallace of Saltaire Excerpts

Wednesday 17th April 2024 Lords Chamber

[Baroness Lister of Burtersett (Lab)]

My Lords, I support all the amendments in this grouping. I think we still have to hear one of them being set out.

The climate emergency is surely the most important issue facing our planet. We should not be responsible for tying the hands of any body, such as a local authority, that might be able to use its position to oppose actions that contribute to environmental degradation. At Second Reading, the Minister, moving onto climate change, said:

“I would like to clarify that the Bill will ban only considerations that are country-specific. It will therefore not prevent public local authorities divesting from fossil fuels or other campaigns that are not country-specific”.—[Official Report, 20/2/24; col. 593.]


But she did not mention the question of legality, because paragraph 10(3) of the schedule makes clear that environmental misconduct means conduct that

“amounts to an offence, whether under the law of a part of the United Kingdom or any other country or territory”.

Yet many of the actions driving the climate emergency are perfectly lawful. Indeed, as Friends of the Earth points out in its briefing, the fact that destructive environmental activity is allowed to continue legally could even be the rationale for a boycott or disinvestment campaign.

So I invite the Minister to reconsider what she said at Second Reading, or, better still, amend the Bill’s schedule so as to remove the reference to an offence under the law and work with other noble Lords whose amendments are in this group to see how we can take on board the concerns that they have raised in those amendments.

[Lord Wallace of Saltaire (LD)]

My Lords, I rise to support these amendments and simply emphasise that the whole issue of climate change and environmental degradation is now a very major one, which divides generations. My children care about it much more passionately than my generation does. In the United States on the hard right, there is still a very powerful climate change denial lobby pushing against the inclusion of environmental sustainability and development goals in company statements and so on. So I think it would be wise to widen this part of the schedule, not just to deal with environmental misconduct but to accept some of the language in the various amendments that we have seen. Again, this goes back to the Government. They are thinking of the long term and about long-term planning and public opinion. It would be wise to see what can be done to adjust the language to accommodate the very real concerns which have been expressed.

[Baroness Deech (CB)]

My Lords, environmental matters are of course very serious, but the question is whether boycotts work. The speech by the noble Lord, Lord Hain, shows the determination on the part of some in this House to boycott Israel come what may. However, if you look at the list of the most polluting and environmentally damaged countries in the world, Israel does not feature, and the degradation in Gaza, which is true, started long before the current invasion—it goes back to when Israel quit Gaza in 2005. Now, the issue is boycotts. People are looking for ways to boycott Israel. I have not noticed any suggestion of boycotting, say, China, for its polluting activities.

--- Later in debate ---

[Lord Warner (CB)]

Absolutely—I thoroughly agree with the noble Lord, and this comes to my question as to whether the Government have thought this through. I do not know what the penalties will be for breaches of this law, but I can foresee that, on some issues, people will feel so strongly that they will be prepared to pay—you might say it is the cost of trade—the penalties so that they can demonstrate to the Government what they feel about a particular action in a particular country by a particular Government. Have the Minister and the Government thought through what happens if there is a willingness among groups of people to take a stand against this Bill, accepting that they may get some financial penalties and being prepared to pay those penalties because they feel so strongly about a particular issue?

[Lord Wallace of Saltaire (LD)]

My Lords, I will try to be brief at this late hour. I spent my entire career studying and writing about foreign policy. The noble Lord, Lord Moylan, was kind enough when he made his speech some months ago to say that, when he joined the Foreign Office, he was told, “You’ve got to read William Wallace’s The Foreign Policy Process in Britain”, before he started work—so I know a little about it.

I emphasise there has always been, and remains, a difference between the approach to foreign policy in the security sense and defence sense—in which it is quite clear one has to have command, central control and therefore real concern about sovereignty—and to trade policy, international investment and procurement, which are usually controlled by a different department, often in competition with the Foreign Office, and in which subordinate entities of government, in most states, also have degrees of latitude. The German Länder pursue different international investment policies. I remarked earlier that the British Government are negotiating trade deals with Washington state, Texas and others within the United States. The idea that all foreign policy in the broadest sense, from immigration through to defence, has to be undertaken by central government is an extreme sovereigntist and unionist case, which I think should not hold.

[Baroness Chapman of Darlington (Lab)]

My Lords, I will be very brief. I do not want to repeat some of the excellent points made, but I do have an amendment in this group about requiring a legislative consent Motion. For us, this is primarily an issue of respect. It saddens us: from the internal market Act, relationships between the UK Government and the devolved Governments started to go really badly wrong. It seems to happen again and again. I remember a couple of weeks ago, in this Chamber, the noble Lord, Lord Moylan, referred to the Welsh Government’s desire to work to support the Welsh language as a fascist attitude. That has played on my mind ever since. Things have really deteriorated to such an extent that, in the personal relationships between politicians in the UK Government and the devolved Governments, which politicians used to take pride in putting some effort and work into, nobody seems to even try anymore. Bills such as this one come along where the Government do not seem to care whether it has any legislative consent and do not even try to persuade their colleagues in the devolved Administrations to see the benefits of a particular piece of legislation. That is very sad. I regret that deeply, and the Government really ought to do better.

This is primarily about freedom of expression for people who have been elected in their own right to represent their communities. It is wrong that Clause 4 prohibits statements. We will come on to that later, but they are to be gagged by the Bill, and that is to be regretted. It is a backwards step. We will debate that another day. I hope that noble Lords will understand just how offensive the restrictions in that clause are to elected Governments in Scotland, Wales and Northern Ireland.

As others have said, the Bill is disproportionate and unnecessary. The Minister and I have had exchanges about things raised by the noble Lord, Lord Foulkes, about the Scottish Government having offices in other nations, and he says that this is wrong because foreign policy is the UK Government’s domain, He is right about that—he does not speak for the Labour Party on these issues and is not right in the complete sense on the points that he makes on this. The Government agree and say that this is a terrible problem, that it is confusing for our partners overseas and that something should be done, but they are doing nothing about it. Instead, they feel that this is causing confusion in foreign policy. I just do not believe it. I do not believe that any other Government anywhere in the world is confused about our foreign policy because of some statement that the noble Baroness, Lady Noakes, says has been put in a drawer somewhere in Edinburgh, was passed 10 years ago, and is somehow causing such diplomatic confusion. I do not see any evidence of that whatsoever.

It is sad that the Government no longer even try to pretend that they want to work in partnership with devolved Governments. We can do so much better. The UK Government already have sanctions powers, and they are now seeking unnecessarily to fetter and gag devolved Governments. This shows a terrible lack of respect and I regret it very much.

Economic Activity of Public Bodies (Overseas Matters) Bill

Lord Wallace of Saltaire Excerpts

Committee stage
Wednesday 17th April 2024 Lords Chamber

Moved by

[Lord Wallace of Saltaire]

10: Clause 2, page 2, line 3, leave out from “decision-maker” to end of line 4 and insert “is acting on behalf of a public body.”
Member’s explanatory statement
This, alongside another to Clause 2 in the name of Lord Wallace of Saltaire, is a probing amendment to clarify the distinction between a public body and a public authority.

[Lord Wallace of Saltaire (LD)]

My Lords, in moving Amendment 10 I will also speak to Amendment 13 and the others in the group. I would particularly like to say how helpful I thought the amendments from the noble Baroness, Lady Noakes, were in helping us to clarify these very broad terms: public bodies and public authorities. I have just been looking back at some of the debates on the Human Rights Act 1998, during which then Home Secretary Jack Straw said that this was an extremely difficult area on which to find an exact definition; he decided to leave it to the courts for further definition.

One of the things we have to consider while discussing this is how much we do want to leave it to the courts, or to ensure that what it says in the legislation is a little tighter than what we have so far. The drafting of the Bill in so many areas is extraordinarily and dangerously loose. I thank the Minister for the letter she has sent me and no doubt others on the question of individual responsibility and personal liability. I am not sure that I entirely understood it; I showed it to one or two legal acquaintances, and they are not sure that they are much clearer than they were before. That perhaps shows some of the difficulties in which we are engaged.

When I first read this Bill, I noticed that it declared in its title that it was about public bodies, and that in Clause 2 it says it is about public authorities. As it happens, I got into the lift with another Member of this House, with whom I worked when he was a Conservative Cabinet Minister during the coalition Government. I asked him casually: “Tell me, do you think that a public body and a public authority are the same thing?”. He said: “Oh no, of course not. The definition of a public body is far narrower than that of a public authority”.

A Bill that starts by having one of these terms in its title, and then goes on to use the other term in the text, raises a number of questions. This morning I reread the impact assessment, which uses the terms interchangeably, by and large preferring “public body” to “public authority”. I worry about how clear those who drafted the Bill are about what they are doing. We then go into “hybrid public bodies”, which the impact assessment talks about, or hybrid public authorities. When I began to read through Lexis and try to understand some of the case law—in which a number of noble and learned Members of this House emerge as those who have made judgments on this—I discovered that functional public authorities and hybrid public authorities raise many of the questions with which we would have to deal, if and when this became an Act. The line between public and private functions for public authorities that are partly public and partly private is a very delicate one, and one on which litigation leaves much room.

We all know what core public authorities are, but hybrid public authorities are a very loose and broad entity. The Minister said on a previous occasion, in another context, that there were well over 100,000 public authorities. No doubt the definition, after a while, becomes extremely unclear. After all, Section 6(3) of the Human Rights Act 1998 talks about

“any person certain of whose functions are functions of a public nature”.

The question of how many functions need to be of a public nature, and how much that affects how they behave in other areas, has been contested in the courts on many occasions. Court cases have ruled that a privatised railway company, for example, is not a public authority, but that a privatised water company and, in a different case, a private provider of social housing are, for certain purposes, public authorities. Rulings have differed on whether private care providers to local authorities are public authorities.

The impact assessment and the ministerial letter refer to “cultural institutions” as coming within this. In the letter that came to us before Second Reading, the Minister talks about museums and galleries that receive significant amounts of public money. Amendment 13 is intended to probe what is meant by significant amounts of public money. I have suggested in that amendment that the bar should be put at 50%, as opposed to whether this was largely public or largely private with public aspects. A court case in 1999 found that the University of Cambridge—

[Lord Grocott (Lab)]

The noble Lord mentioned at one stage whether railway companies are public bodies. A train operating company, for example, is clearly not a public body when it is a private company, but if it goes bankrupt or has difficulties it gets taken over by the Government. If the Government then get it right in due course, it goes back to the private sector. Can bodies oscillate between the two categories? Is that a further complication?

[Lord Wallace of Saltaire (LD)]

I defer to my noble friends on that. Part of my concern about this law is that there will be a great deal of employment for my learned friends to be found in it, if it were to go through.

Indeed, that is one of the things which appears in the delegated powers memorandum, which says at paragraph 4:

“It is intended that the measures will be widely construed”.


Paragraph 12 says:

“The prohibition will apply to ‘public authorities’ in accordance with section 6 HRA 1998; however, interpretations of section 6 HRA 1998 can create uncertainty which means that the Bill may, including as case law evolves, capture a range of bodies that it was not necessarily intended to apply to. It may be necessary to put beyond doubt that certain bodies (that are outside the scope of the intention to ban public bodies from boycotts and divestments) fall outside the definition of ‘public authority’ for the purpose of the Bill”.


I hope that the lack of clarity of that is clear.

The impact assessment does refer to hybrid public bodies and suggests that it is concerned to prevent them pursuing political and foreign policy agendas, “including with public money”. I interpret that as meaning that such hybrid public authorities may perhaps not be allowed to pursue such agendas, including when they are using private money. That is a question that will concern a great many people, in particular the university sector, from which we have received further correspondence on this precise area.

The Minister has not told us enough about the broad last category, cultural institutions, and whether this includes theatres and orchestras on foreign tours, as well as museums and galleries—and why on earth museums and galleries are in there. That is another area where I suspect that sector would prefer a little more certainty.

Universities have been particularly concerned about the impact on their international partnerships, which are, I am assured by my university friends, part of their private functions. Some of these are education partnerships, some are transnational research partnerships —I declare an interest, in that my son is actively engaged in this—and some are with foreign companies and donors. They can be very sensitive and can raise reputational problems, as some universities, including the one I used to work for, have learned to their cost. Again, it would be helpful if we had more detailed guidance on that.

At several points in the impact assessment, and in the memoranda to the Delegated Powers Committee and others, the Government emphasise the importance of ensuring the coherence of British foreign policy, and that it should not allow others to conduct their own foreign policy agendas. I notice the Express reported the other week that the Government have signed immensely valuable trade deals with Washington state and Texas. It seems an interesting contradiction for the British Government to insist that subordinate entities within the UK state should not be allowed to engage in any sort of deal with other countries while they actively attempt to get past Washington to deal with American states. I am not sure whether these are significant trade deals or not; I have the memorandum of understanding with the state of Washington and it seems rather less substantial than the Daily Express suggests.

The Minister may be thinking that precision does not matter so much in the Bill because it is intended to be largely performative and not to lead, in practice, to any serious enforcement. After all, the impact assessment notes how little boycott activity there has so far been beyond discussion, and the Bill is unlikely to be implemented before the coming election. However, we should not be in the business of permitting the Government to put badly drafted law on to the statute book for show. We need much greater clarity, and I look forward to what the noble Baroness, Lady Noakes, will say about the need for clarity in this area. The Minister shares with the House the responsibility to ensure that the Bill does not become an Act without much greater clarity about its terminology and the extent of its reach over the UK’s public and private bodies. I beg to move.

--- Later in debate ---

[The Minister of State, Cabinet Office (Baroness Neville- Rolfe) (Con)]

My Lords, I am grateful for the thoughtful contributions from across the Committee. On the first day of Committee, which also touched on the scope of this Bill, we heard from the noble Lords, Lord Collins and Lord Wallace, the noble Baroness, Lady Fox, and my noble friends Lady Noakes and Lord Johnson. We discussed the Bill’s application to hybrid public authorities. Today, we have heard in slightly different terms from the noble Lord, Lord Wallace, my noble friend Lady Noakes and, of course, from the noble Baroness, Lady Chapman. I will try and come back on her essay question if I can.

Obviously, we have carefully considered the points raised in these debates. I would like to expand on our view of the scope in relation to Amendments 10, 11, 12, 13 and 14. As noble Lords have said, the Bill will apply to public authorities, as defined in Section 6 of the Human Rights Act 1998. I would like to explain, in response to the concerns of the noble Lord, Lord Wallace of Saltaire, that “public body” is a general term with no single legal definition. The Bill’s Short Title provides a general indication of the subject matter of the Bill, and it is not unusual for the Short Title to use different terminology from the Bill’s substantive provisions.

[Lord Wallace of Saltaire (LD)]

My Lords, I apologise for interrupting. The Minister will be well aware that there is a particular use of the term “public body” by the Office for National Statistics, which means that debt incurred by a public body is counted as part of the national debt. That means that whether or not some of these hybrid public authorities are defined as public bodies matters a great deal to their financial planning. Again, the university sector is particularly concerned about this.

--- Later in debate ---

[Baroness Neville-Rolfe (Con)]

It depends, and it also depends on case law under the Human Rights Act, which I have undertaken to look at and come back to noble Lords.

[Lord Wallace of Saltaire (LD)]

My Lords, I cannot resist suggesting that one definition of a “public function” is somewhere you are served warm white wine and canapés. That is a suggestion of how loose some of these terms can be.

The concern that a lot of us have about the Bill is that we are not entirely confident that the Government have thought through its full implications. The manifesto commitment was specific to boycotts against Israel and was concerned particularly with local authorities and universities. But we have a Bill here with a much wider set of definitions and a universal set of foreign states to which it applies, which raises a much larger number of questions. We also have a whole succession of loose definitions, which the DLUHC memorandum to the Delegated Powers Committee says, in effect, that we should not worry too much about, as we will do this all with regulations. I hope that the noble Lord, Lord Hodgson, would think that it is not necessarily always a good idea to leave everything to regulations. We are asking for greater clarity, certainty and, above all, precision, and a more limited potential scope for the Bill.

--- Later in debate ---

[Baroness Randerson (LD)]

My Lords, I will briefly go back to the Government’s own list of public bodies on GOV.UK. Of that list of public bodies, there are 18 listed for the Department for Education, none of which is a university. The Minister referred to overlapping definitions in the Bill. I have been sitting here and thinking about that, and wondering where the University of Buckingham sits in the Government’s concept of where universities lie, because that is a private university but one which is fulfilling exactly the same functions as all the other universities in the UK. Those other universities are, of course, exempt charities and so we are on a whole series of conflicting paths here, with just one aspect of the definition of public bodies that this Bill seems to wish to encompass. I raise these issues so that the Minister can perhaps give us some of her thoughts on these overlapping definitions and where they actually sit within the Bill.

[Lord Wallace of Saltaire (LD)]

My Lords, first, we are in the territory of the chilling effect, are we not? If there is a very large number of bodies which are not going to be sure how far they come within the scope of this Bill, they will be very nervous about doing things that they would otherwise do. That is why leaving it so unclear as to how far the definitions of this Bill stretch over the sector, in which public and private institutions, and public and private functions, overlap so closely, is highly undesirable.

Secondly, this clearly will require very substantial subordinate legislation. I think it is the sense of this House that it is a bad thing to pass Bills that need too much subordinate legislation. Yesterday, the noble Lord, Lord Hayward, whom I regard as an extremely good friend, said to me that the subordinate legislation under the Elections Act, which we passed in 2022, is now approaching 1,000 pages, and that the Electoral Commission is spending a considerable amount of its time providing guidance for local authority electoral registration officers on what this means for them. That is bad legislation; we want to avoid that again here.

Thirdly, there have been occasions, as others are aware, where lists of public bodies have been provided. The Minister will remember the SI on trade union levies being taken, or no longer being taken, automatically from pay scales for particular public bodies. That had a list, at the end, in the schedule, of over 200 bodies, which included some quite interesting ones such as the Scottish salmon council, and various semi-charitable local institutions to do with, as I remember, care homes and nurseries.

Fourthly, to add to the question of universities, what universities are most concerned about is whether or not the student loan book, which is a very large sum, is included in the Treasury’s calculation of national debt. That is not a marginal issue; it is quite important. That is why definitions such as this and how they are used by different parts of government and recognised be the courts are extremely important.