House of Lords (Hereditary Peers) (Abolition of By-Elections) Bill [HL]

Lord Wallace of Saltaire Excerpts

2nd reading
Friday 3rd December 2021 Lords Chamber

[Lord Wallace of Saltaire (LD)]

My Lords, I withdrew my name from this debate yesterday because I was told that it was likely to go on well after 1.30 pm, and I have to be up in Saltaire by 5.30 pm. It takes those of us who live outside the south-east longer to get home. I congratulate all those who have spoken on the self-discipline and brevity of their interventions, and I am therefore happy to speak briefly on this.

I joined the pre-reform House and I recall the Cranborne agreement directly because, as it happened, my wife and I were in the back of Lord Ashdown’s car, as his wife drove us to a dinner in Windsor. We were listening in to the negotiations that he was having with the Government about what Lord Cranborne had offered. I can confirm that this was clearly intended to be temporary—the pebble in the shoe, as the noble Lord, Lord Hannan, rightly said. The question is: when do we take the next stage of partial reform, and what should it be? I welcome the comment from the noble Earl, Lord Attlee, that there should be not just this Bill but also a statutory appointments committee. That is the least of the steps that we could next take.

[Lord Lilley (Con)]

Who would select the people on this statutory appointments committee? Quis custodiet ipsos custodes?

[Lord Wallace of Saltaire (LD)]

That is a question of public appointment, as we know, and there is some controversy about public appointments—but we have approaches to them. Making the committee on public appointments also a statutory body is perhaps also something that we need to do when we have a Prime Minister who is not, in the terms of the noble Lord, Lord Hennessy, a “good chap”.

[Earl Attlee (Con)]

My Lords, we already have an Appointments Commission for the Cross Benches.

[Lord Wallace of Saltaire (LD)]

I thank the noble Earl. I agree with the noble Lord, Lord Hannan, that we should then move towards a partially elected House, at least, or perhaps even an indirectly elected House. That is the direction of travel in which we need to go.

We all know that the second Chamber does valuable work. I say to the Minister: yesterday, I was checking how long the House of Commons had spent scrutinising the Dissolution and Calling of Parliament Bill. It was just under two hours for Committee, Report and Third Reading. We ought to give that a little more scrutiny, and that is what this House is here for and does very well, as we all know.

My plea to the Minister is: I hope that he will imitate the example of the noble Lord, Lord Young, and do his best to stretch his brief. We all know that it will say that the Government are opposed to piecemeal reform, the time is not ripe and this needs further consideration. It is clear that this debate has been quite different from that of some years ago. Even in this House, the mood is changing. We will come towards taking this step within the next five to 10 years, and perhaps he might even suggest that it could be in the next Conservative manifesto. Therefore, I look forward to what the Minister will say, and I hope that he will give us a little encouragement at the very least—as far as his brief will allow it—and that we take this forward.

Dissolution and Calling of Parliament Bill

Lord Wallace of Saltaire Excerpts

2nd reading
Tuesday 30th November 2021 Lords Chamber

[Lord Wallace of Saltaire (LD)]

My Lords, I take issue with the repetition of the phrase “tried and tested” by the Minister and others to defend prerogative power. The British people, the Minister declared, lived with the previous system for centuries. For several of those centuries, this country was at best semi-democratic. In the 17th century, as the noble Earl, Lord Leicester, reminded us, Chief Justice Coke stoutly defended the rule of law against the royal prerogative. Parliament’s resistance to the royal prerogative led to civil war and the execution of the king, followed 40 years later by the expulsion of his second successor and the invitation to his Dutch son-in-law to become king instead. Our 18th century political system was highly corrupt, with bribery and patronage underpinning government. I hope that that is not a tried and tested system to which anyone would like to return us.

Reform in the 19th century made for higher standards and greater democracy, almost always against the entrenched resistance of the Tory party. Throughout the past 400 years, as the noble Lord, Lord Grocott, remarked, the whole history of Parliament has been the transfer of powers from the monarch to Parliament. I challenge the Minister to list for the House the occasions on which Parliament has legislated to restore prerogative powers.

Two new reports from committees of this House have expressed deep concerns relevant to this debate. The Delegated Powers Committee last Thursday published a report called Democracy Denied? The Urgent Need to Rebalance Power Between Parliament and the Executive. It said that parliamentary democracy is

“founded on the principles of … parliamentary sovereignty, the rule of law and the accountability of the executive to Parliament … The shift of power from Parliament to the executive must stop.”

The report of the Secondary Legislation Scrutiny Committee, in parallel, is entitled Government by Diktat: a Call to Return Power to Parliament. It declares:

“A critical moment has now been reached when that balance”—


between Parliament and the Executive—

“must be re-set: not restored to how things were immediately before these exceptional recent events”—

by which it means Brexit and Covid—

“but re-set afresh”.

Both of these committees remind us that limited government—or liberal democracy—depends on checks and balances among three constitutional actors: Parliament, elected and representing the people; the judiciary, safeguarding the rule of law; and government, wielding executive power.

In the exceptional circumstances of 2017 to 2019, both Theresa May and Boris Johnson claimed to represent the will of the people against Parliament: direct democracy, with the leader speaking for the masses against the elites. The noble Lord, Lord True, has faithfully repeated their claim, adding on several occasions that the December 2019 election showed decisively that the Government do speak for the people—if necessary, against Parliament—having won 43.5% of the popular vote.

Lord Hailsham many years ago warned that the UK’s constitutional arrangements allowed for an effective “electoral dictatorship” between elections, with executive power escaping parliamentary scrutiny and judicial oversight. What we have glimpsed in the past four years is the shadow of authoritarian populism breaking through the conventions of our unwritten constitution. Michael Gove argued in the Commons Second Reading debate on this Bill that Parliament in 2019 was

“frustrating the will of the people”—[Official Report, Commons, 6/7/2021; col. 789.]

which he believed a new Prime Minister—who had scarcely appeared before Parliament since taking office—nevertheless authentically represented. The will of the people is the cry of populist demagogues, not of constitutional democrats.

I re-read last week the 2019 report by the noble Lord, Lord Hennessy, for the Constitution Society: Good Chaps No More? It denounces the willingness of our current Prime Minister to break the rules and misrepresent evidence in his first months in office. He says:

“A key characteristic of the British constitution is the degree to which the good governance of the United Kingdom has relied on the self-restraint of those who carry it out … If general standards of good behaviour among senior UK politicians can no longer be taken for granted, then neither can the sustenance of key constitutional principles.”


Sadly, good behaviour by senior politicians cannot be taken for granted, so I say to the noble Lord, Lord Bridges, that codification is therefore needed. As the Secondary Legislation Scrutiny Committee has just put it, we now need a reset, not a restoration of the previous status quo.

The noble Lord, Lord True, has defended the Government’s abandonment of their manifesto promise of a broader approach to reform through a constitutional commission. He told the House the other week that he also opposed piecemeal reform. So now he is supporting a piecemeal reactionary Bill—a Bill that restores prerogative power and weakens the judiciary. I look forward to hearing how he manages to defend that.

The Select Committee on the Constitution reminded us that

“prerogative powers are an exception to the sovereignty of Parliament.”

Successive reports from committees of both Houses over the last 20 years have noted that the direction of travel has been to reduce the extent of prerogative powers, and to extend parliamentary oversight. This Bill would reverse that direction.

We will therefore attempt to amend this Bill. We will support the replacement of Clause 3 by a requirement for an affirmative vote in the Commons before the Prime Minister requests a Dissolution. We will also seek to include a parallel requirement for this before Prorogation. Moving the Second Reading in the Commons, Michael Gove made it entirely clear that Clause 3 had been included because of the Supreme Court’s decision on Prorogation in 2019. Lord Sumption indicated in his evidence to the Joint Committee that the Prime Minister

“was effectively attempting to rule without Parliament”

for as long as possible. That surely brings the issue of Prorogation within the scope of this Bill.

We will wish to gain assurances from the Government —and here I strongly agree with the noble Baroness, Lady Taylor of Bolton—that a draft revised version of the Cabinet Manual will be published before this Bill becomes an Act, and will be presented to the appropriate committees of both Houses for review, as has been strongly recommended by her Select Committee. The Cabinet Manual provides a directory of our constitutional conventions—if you like, a shadow constitutional document.

We will also wish for assurances on a revised version of the Dissolution Principles, which should also appropriately cover the process of government formation. The draft principles and conventions on confidence, Dissolution and Government formation on pages 61 to 65 of the Joint Committee report are far better and fuller than the one-page sketch that the Government provided.

The Joint Committee draft also wisely deals with the issue of Government formation in the event that an election does not produce a single-party majority. Opinion polls over the past six to nine months have consistently shown between 25% and 30% of voters supporting parties other than the Conservatives or Labour. This suggests that the result of the next election might well be again a Parliament without a single-party majority. Any form of future proofing, as others have said, would therefore need to take this into account. I recognise that the Conservatives will attempt in the Elections Bill to bias our electoral system further to their advantage, but it is still possible, despite their huge advantages in funding and office, that they will not retain power.

We have just witnessed a well-managed change of government in Germany, during which the outgoing Government stayed in office for eight weeks after the election, while three parties carefully negotiated a detailed agreement as the basis for a stable coalition. We may need to develop a similar approach here and should anticipate the likelihood of its occurrence.

Since we are discussing some fundamental issues of democracy, I will add a further question for the Minister. In 10 days’ time, the President of our most important democratic ally, the United States, is convening a virtual summit of democracies to discuss the challenges and dangers that they now face, to which several noble Lords have referred. The UK sees itself as one of the world’s oldest democracies, yet the Government have so far said nothing about this summit: whether they plan to take part, which Minister will lead, and what we might contribute. Will the Minister provide this House, before 9 December, with a Statement on what part, if any, the Government plan to play in President Biden’s summit of democracies? We should never take democracy for granted: it needs to be defended.

Retained EU Law

Lord Wallace of Saltaire Excerpts

Thursday 18th November 2021 Lords Chamber

[Lord Frost (Con)]

A number of things have happened since those commitments were made, including a general election, which we won with a clear set of policies. Our policy on this matter was as I set out on 16 September in my Statement, and we are considering the best way of delivering that policy.

[Lord Wallace of Saltaire (LD)]

I recall an earlier review of the balance of competences between the UK and the EU. Does the Minister recall that one of the most prolific submitters of evidence was the Scotch Whisky Association, of which he was then, I believe, director? All of them argued in favour of the advantages of the single market and shared regulation. Can he explain when, why and how he went through a damascene conversion from the evidence that was then submitted to his current extraordinary ideological position?

[Lord Frost (Con)]

My Lords, actually, I was not CEO of the Scotch Whisky Association at the time; I was an official, working on the very review the noble Lord refers to. The policy of the Government at the time was to remain in the European Union, and therefore it is not surprising that the review reached that conclusion.

House of Lords: Appointments Process

Lord Wallace of Saltaire Excerpts

Thursday 18th November 2021 Lords Chamber

[Lord Wallace of Saltaire (LD)]

My Lords, we are of course dealing with another aspect of the royal prerogative, to which we will return when the Dissolution and recall Bill finally hits this House. The prerogative after all is there on the basis of the assumption and the conventions of our constitution that Prime Ministers will always act with restraint. We now have a Prime Minister who does not understand what restraint is, so we are in some difficulty.

I agreed strongly with the noble Lord, Lord Hannan; I hope it does not upset him too much. I remind him that his party’s manifesto in 2019 proposed a constitutional commission as one of the many promises that the Prime Minister has broken. No doubt, the noble Lord, Lord True, if asked, would say, “Well, it was a good idea not to follow that bit”, but I think it was a huge mistake.

We are a valuable second Chamber. One of our newest Members said to me the other day, “I had not realised till I got here that most of the scrutiny of government legislation goes on in the House of Lords.” That is the valuable job we do; it is why we need a second Chamber. Piecemeal reform may be the only way forward, so let us consider what piecemeal reform the Government might accept.

I hope that the Minister will say that the Government are considering seriously the CSPL’s proposal that the Appointments Commission should be on a statutory basis. That is the least the Minister might give. The Government should consider separation of appointments and honours—perhaps we should all be called senators, or whatever, instead. Term limits and age limits are due to come in. I recognise that that would mean that I would be going almost immediately—I have been here 25 years and have just passed my 80th birthday, which is what I believe our learned Lords call the statutory age of senility, so that is it.

I am in favour of much more radical reform. I would like us at the very least to be indirectly elected, and a second Chamber in our multinational state should reflect its nations and regions. That is where I want to get to, but let us at least push a little further in that direction by piecemeal means.

Hereditary Peers: By-elections

Lord Wallace of Saltaire Excerpts

Wednesday 10th November 2021 Lords Chamber

[Lord True (Con)]

My Lords, I regret that I do not agree with my noble friend. He will know that the position of the Government is that we do not favour piecemeal reform and that overall reform needs careful consideration.

[Lord Wallace of Saltaire (LD)]

My Lords, the role and composition of a second Chamber would be appropriately discussed by a constitutional convention. The noble Lord may recall that his party’s manifesto promised us the establishment of a constitutional convention, which should appropriately be on an all-party basis. The Government appear to have abandoned that. Will the Minister pledge to argue with his colleagues that they should reconsider it?

[Lord True (Con)]

My Lords, again, we have discussed this before. I have made clear in this House and the Government have made clear that the proposed groundwork of the commission is being carried forward in separate workstreams—for example, the Faulks review on judicial work. We have decided to pursue this through separate workstreams.

Ministerial Code

Lord Wallace of Saltaire Excerpts

Tuesday 9th November 2021 Lords Chamber

[Lord True (Con)]

No, my Lords.

[Lord Wallace of Saltaire (LD)]

My Lords, I am sure that the Minister is fully briefed on the report last week from the Committee on Standards in Public Life. Paragraph 2.25 says:

“It is clear to the Committee that the degree of independence in the regulation of the Ministerial Code … falls below what is necessary to ensure effective regulation and maintain public credibility.”


Do the Government accept this criticism and, if so, are there plans to strengthen the independence of the adviser on ministerial interests?

[Lord True (Con)]

My Lords, I have partly answered that, in saying that the Government are obviously considering all the very important and thoughtful reports that have been presented on these matters in recent weeks and months. We take matters of ethics extraordinarily seriously, as I believe every Member of your Lordships’ House does, on all sides. I give an assurance to the House that we will come back with a Statement on these issues in due course.

Protocol on Ireland/Northern Ireland: Impact on Trade

Lord Wallace of Saltaire Excerpts

Thursday 21st October 2021 Lords Chamber

[Lord Frost (Con)]

My Lords, my noble friend identifies an important point, which is that trade in both goods and services is subject to a lot of noise at the moment—the ongoing Covid pandemic, the effects of leaving the customs union and the single market, stock building and so on—and it is difficult to isolate trends. Nevertheless, our goods exports are nearly back to the levels of 2019. Services exports and imports are down somewhat, but of course the huge impact on the movement of persons, tourism and so on has very significantly affected those figures. So it will be a long time before we reach a steady state, but I have huge confidence in the ability of our exporters and traders to manage that situation.

[Lord Wallace of Saltaire (LD)]

My Lords, can the Minister clarify whether he understood when negotiating the protocol that it was incompatible with British sovereignty, or whether he has discovered that since? He will recall that AV Dicey’s definition of UK sovereignty as indivisible, which I know he now follows, was shaped by his active and bitter opposition to Irish home rule. In those terms, the Good Friday agreement is also an infringement of indivisible UK sovereignty. Does the Minister think that should also be renegotiated?

[Lord Frost (Con)]

My Lords, the difficulty we have with the protocol is not so much the sovereignty issue, because the territorial integrity of the UK and the integrity of the internal market of the UK are very clearly protected in the protocol, but the difficulty it has generated in movements of goods and trade within the United Kingdom. If the protocol was to work, it would have required very sensitive handling. Unfortunately, it has not had that sensitive handling, and therefore we have a political problem.

Government: Leadership Training

Lord Wallace of Saltaire Excerpts

Thursday 16th September 2021 Lords Chamber

[Lord Wallace of Saltaire (LD)]

My Lords, I start by apologising to the House and the noble Lord, Lord Norton, that I am the only speaker from the Liberal Democrat Benches. There were four Liberal Democrat names down but, unfortunately, my three colleagues had to return to distant parts of this country—the Scottish Borders, the West Country and East Anglia. I have heard from a number of Conservative Peers over the past few months the suggestion that all the Liberal elite are metropolitan. That is not the case. I suspect that the illiberal financial elite is a good deal more metropolitan than we are.

I have some interests to declare. My wife was for some years a civil servant, including a period teaching at what was then the Civil Service College. A number of my other relations and former students are in the senior Civil Service. I taught in a number of Civil Service College courses in the 1970s and 1980s, in senior management courses in the 1990s and in executive courses at the London School of Economics provided by the Spanish Government and a number of multi- national corporations and banks.

The noble Lord, Lord Maude, reminds me of the embarrassing occasion some 25 years ago when I arrived at the Kennedy School of Government at Harvard to teach a series of seminars on British foreign policy and recognised among the students the newly-appointed Permanent Secretary of the Foreign and Commonwealth Office. These things are not entirely new.

The noble Lord, Lord Herbert, also reminded me of the story of the Liberal Democrat Minister under the noble Lord, Lord Maude. The Minister’s private office explained that he could not have a car to take him back to his constituency. When he replied, “So I can take my red box on the train and work on it there?”, the answer was, “No, Minister, you can’t. The red box cannot be allowed on a train. It will be sent ahead by car.”

The Motion refers to the “introduction” of training for Ministers and senior civil servants. Civil servants have been trained, as I have suggested, for some time. Ministerial training presents an existential problem in a political system in which, as the noble Lord, Lord Young, and others suggested, Ministers are expected to answer in Parliament and to the media within a day or two of their appointment. There is a very strong case in general for a slower process of government formation.

I agree with the Commission for Smart Government’s proposals for a longer transition period between Governments—the noble Lord, Lord Herbert, suggested up to two weeks, on the Canadian model—and for

“an interval between announcement and taking up position, to enable incoming Ministers to read up and be … fully briefed before they start work.”

Effective use of junior ministerial appointments as training for senior roles would also help, although some Secretaries of State, in my experience, are remarkably uninterested in treating their junior Ministers as part of a team. Expert advisers—which is what spads were when first introduced—are also highly useful and desirable.

However, there is an underlying issue about political recruitment. Fewer lawyers now become MPs than 50 years ago, as do fewer with experience in local government or elsewhere managing within the public sector. The Commons offers a narrow talent pool. The emasculation of local democracy means that MPs now spend more and more of their time on local issues and less on national or international ones. A Commons Public Administration Committee report in 2015 recommended a parliamentary Civil Service scheme along the lines of the Armed Forces Parliamentary Scheme. That should be considered further.

However, more Ministers in the Lords, or even non-parliamentary Ministers, will not win support from MPs. I agree strongly with the noble Lord, Lord Young, that fewer Ministers must be part of the answer.

Training for civil servants, by contrast, has a long history, from the Fulton report to the Civil Service Department, then to the Civil Service College, which became the National School of Government. A Conservative Minister abolished the NSG in 2010 and sold off the campus. The PACAC report The Minister and the Official noted in 2018:

“It is now widely accepted that the closure of the National School of Government has left a gap”


in the training and professional development of civil servants that has not yet been closed.

What is now proposed is in many ways reinventing the wheel—which does not make it any less desirable. I have heard highly critical remarks from some civil servants about the contracted-out courses that have been provided since 2010 and I strongly support proposals to reconstruct a physical centre for Civil Service training, which would also bring together people with experience across the wider public sector and beyond—what the senior management course used to do.

Mutual trust between Ministers and officials is essential to effective government. Ministers too easily treat efforts to point out the complexities of policy changes as attempts to resist or undermine what they want to do. Many Labour Ministers in 1997 assumed when they came in that officials were naturally conservative and therefore unsympathetic to Labour proposals. Many Conservatives in 2010 believed that officials were pen-pushers and bureaucrats, who would be out making more money in the private sector if they were any good and were concerned primarily with defending their own jobs and privileges. Some still believe that today.

Attacks by Michael Gove and others on “the Blob”, which, for Simon Heffer in last Sunday’s Telegraph, covers the Civil Service, higher education, the Church of England, the BBC—of course—and the leadership of the NHS and the Metropolitan Police, do not help build confidence that this is a Government open to challenge and willing to listen to argument, and who value a well-trained and politically neutral public service. The quality of ministerial leadership in recent Governments has been, at best, mixed. Bad Ministers blame their officials, as bad workmen blame their tools. Ministers have to earn the respect of their officials and hold it. I have seen Conservative Ministers expressing their distrust of the Civil Service in front of senior officials—a leadership style that does not strike me as very effective. I have noted excellent senior officials with whom I worked in government leaving because they felt they could no longer work with Ministers who dismiss reasoned argument. That does not promote smart government either.

I felt there was an air of fantasy about the declaration on government reform this June and the speech by Michael Gove that accompanied it. It spoke of the success of the management of the pandemic, of rational policy-making without concern for tactical advantage, press presentation or partisan patronage. There was no mention of the fiasco and excessive cost of test and trace, of the smell of corruption in the way contracts were handled or the enormous profits that outsourcing companies have made by providing services that local authorities and local public health officers could have managed more cheaply and effectively.

The Commission for Smart Government report also has some fantastical elements. If departmental boards are really intended to provide vigorous challenge to ministerial and official groupthink, then recent appointments of non-executive directors have been extraordinarily ill chosen.

The government of England is dreadfully over- centralised. Ministers in Whitehall concern themselves with the details of issues that were entirely within the hands of local government 40 years ago. Sending bits of Whitehall departments to Middlesbrough or Manchester will not do much to bring citizens and government together. That requires a revival of effective and democratic local government, which would enable Westminster and Whitehall to reduce the numbers of central Ministers and officials, and even to shrink our bloated Cabinet to a size where it might again become an effective body. It is time for a careful review of the cost effectiveness of outsourcing of many public services after a pandemic in which the profits of outsourcing and consultancy companies have risen sharply, with the Government supporting far larger salaries for the flood of consultants than in-house experts would have cost.

If we are to be really smart about good government, we should attempt reforms that will last longer than the life of any one party in power. The Fulton report managed that. I encourage the rational reformers, such as the noble Lord, Lord Herbert, to resist the uber-partisans within the Conservative Party who want to push ahead without consulting anyone outside the Conservative Party, and try to create reforms with wider support that will outlast the next election or two. This is the sort of issue that might usefully have been covered by a constitutional commission, as promised in the Conservatives’ 2019 manifesto. Sadly, the promise to establish such a commission has been broken.

Standards in Public Life

Lord Wallace of Saltaire Excerpts

Thursday 9th September 2021 Lords Chamber

[Lord Wallace of Saltaire (LD)]

My Lords, this is the third occasion this week on which the House has considered related aspects of the Government’s disregard for the advice of different bodies on the standards of public life. The noble Lord, Lord True, was a close adviser to John Major when the Committee on Standards in Public Life was set up and, we must assume, then agreed with his reform to strengthen propriety and ethics in government. I hope he will not now deny that there is a real problem of declining propriety in this Government. Our Prime Minister seems to think that the rules which govern our constitutional democracy do not apply to him.

The Minister and other Conservatives dismiss concerns on a number of grounds. The noble Lord, Lord True, has told us several times that the Government’s overwhelming majority in the 2019 election allows them to behave as they wish. Another argument is that only the metropolitan liberal elite worries about such fine distinctions on the rules of political behaviour and that most people accept that Governments share the spoils of office with their friends. I remind the Government Benches that their apparent majority in December 2019 rested on 43.5% of the popular vote.

I also remind them that one prudent rule for any democratic Government is that they should refrain from actions that they would strongly oppose if they were taken by a Government of a different colour. We can all imagine the raucous opposition that Conservatives and the Conservative press would create if a Labour Government or—even worse—a left-of-centre coalition dominated by metropolitan liberals bent the conventions of constitutional propriety. This Government will not be in power for ever—unless they manage to bend constitutional financial rules a lot further.

Constitutional democracy is not a contest, as the noble Lord, Lord Blunkett, said, in which the winner takes all and the losers have to swallow whatever humiliation is inflicted on them. It is about limited government, checks and balances on executive power, the rule of law, transparency and respect for minorities as well as for the majority currently in power. The new book of the noble Lord, Lord Norton of Louth, Governing Britain, spells this out very well and I recommend it to all on the Conservative Benches.

The debates that surrounded the drafting of the US constitution set out these principles well. In Britain, our constitution has evolved through a series of understandings about limits on executive power. If those in government throw over those understandings, they undermine our unwritten constitution and threaten to slide from good government to corrupt and authoritarian government.

Standards matter, too, and the CSPL sets out a number of concerns about current shortcomings, such as a lack of transparency in many public appointment processes and the limited independence of the Prime Minister’s officially titled independent adviser on the Ministerial Code. I particularly noted the reference in paragraph 35 to the implications of the massive growth in government outsourcing and the opportunities for corruption that it has opened up—as we may have seen in the management of the Covid pandemic. Other CSPL reports have focused on the regulation of electoral finance and the importance of the Electoral Commission. Careful regulation of money in politics in vital to the maintenance of an open, democratic system. The weakening of limits on campaign spending in the USA has clearly damaged the quality of American democracy; we need to avoid the same happening here, and the forthcoming Elections Bill threatens to do that.

The Minister has adapted remarkably easily to the transition from John Major’s style of ethical government to the rule-bending populism of Boris Johnson. I nevertheless hope that he will reassure the House that he remains committed, personally as well as on behalf of the Government, to the seven principles of public life, to ethical standards, to transparency and public accountability in appointments, and to maintaining broad public trust in government. The Prime Minister likes to speak about the UK as a beacon of democracy for the world; it is the Minister’s responsibility to ensure that that beacon does not get dimmer.

Government Departments: Non-Executive Directors

Lord Wallace of Saltaire Excerpts

Wednesday 8th September 2021 Lords Chamber

Asked by

[Lord Wallace of Saltaire]

To ask Her Majesty’s Government what professional expertise and qualifications they look for when appointing non-executive directors of Government departments.

[The Minister of State, Cabinet Office (Lord True) (Con)]

My Lords, departmental non-executive board members are appointed by the Secretary of State following the principle of selection based on merit. The majority of roles are advertised on Her Majesty’s Government’s public appointments website. The corporate governance code for central government departments states that appointees shall be

“experts from outside government … primarily from the commercial private sector, with experience of managing large and complex organisations”.

[Lord Wallace of Saltaire (LD)]

The Minister will be aware of the comments that the Committee on Standards in Public Life made in Standards Matter 2. Paragraph 88 states:

“However there is an increasing trend amongst ministers to appoint supporters or political allies as NEDs. This both undermines the ability of NEDs to scrutinise the work of their departments, and has a knock-on effect on the appointments process elsewhere.”


Does the Minister accept that criticism and does he also accept the strong recommendation of the Committee on Standards in Public Life that the appointments process for non-executive directors of government departments should be regulated?

[Lord True (Con)]

My Lords, the Government obviously respect the recommendations in any report from the Committee on Standards in Public Life, and we will consider and respond to those recommendations in due course. I believe that talent is not confined to people of a single political opinion. Therefore, I do not follow the noble Lord in the implication that anybody who has ever supported the Conservative Party should be disqualified from one of these roles.