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.