House of Lords: Appointments Process
Lord Wallace of Saltaire Excerpts(3 years ago)
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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.
Retained EU Law
Lord Wallace of Saltaire Excerpts(3 years ago)
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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.
Hereditary Peers: By-elections
Lord Wallace of Saltaire Excerpts(3 years ago)
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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(3 years ago)
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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(3 years, 1 month ago)
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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(3 years, 2 months ago)
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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(3 years, 2 months ago)
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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(3 years, 2 months ago)
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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.
House of Lords Appointments Commission
Lord Wallace of Saltaire Excerpts(3 years, 2 months ago)
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Lord Wallace of Saltaire (LD)
My Lords, attacks on the alleged metropolitan elite entrenched on the Cross-Benches and on these Benches by wealthy Conservatives who grew up in the Home Counties and made their careers in the City of London are absurd. For the record, I spent the Recess on the outskirts of Bradford, not in Islington or Surrey.
Fundamentally, as the Minister will recognise, this is about the power of the Prime Minister to exercise prerogative powers without restraint. As the ability of the monarch to constrain her Prime Minister shrunk, the exercise of Crown prerogative powers by the Prime Minister was moderated by the willingness of successive political leaders to behave within the limits of what was regarded as acceptable behaviour. Eton educated political leaders were assumed to be the most trustworthy in this respect. They had been taught the importance of conventions and constraints on power, and the sense of shame for those who broke them.
Now we have an Etonian Prime Minister who does not accept the importance of constraints or of advisory bodies in ensuring that conventions are observed and who appears to have no sense of shame. Today we are discussing the Lords Appointments Commission, but this also applies to observance of the Ministerial Code, the appointment of non-executive directors to Whitehall departments and to many other aspects of the standards of our public life.
When politicians refuse to observe established conventions of appropriate behaviour, it becomes necessary to strengthen those rules by statute. Decisions on the size of our second Chamber and the qualifications for membership of it have constitutional implications. I accept that David Lloyd George in his time abused prime ministerial power in Lords appointments. That was corrupt. Boris Johnson is abusing prerogative power in the same way. To paraphrase Lord Acton, all power corrupts; unconstrained power corrupts without constraints.
National Insurance Numbers: Electoral Register
Lord Wallace of Saltaire Excerpts(3 years, 4 months ago)
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Lord True (Con) [V]
My Lords, we will have many hours to discuss these matters on the Elections Bill. Time is short now, but I reject the view that that Bill is anything to do with voter suppression. I think the Labour Party has adopted a position on that which is contrary to the overwhelming view of the public that voter ID is sensible. So far as automatic registration is concerned, I can only repeat that the Government have no plans to introduce it.
Lord Wallace of Saltaire (LD)
My Lords, one person’s forced registration may be another person’s citizens’ rights. When I was the Lords’ Minister in the Cabinet Office, some years ago now, government digital experts were discussing the greater integration of local and central public data and the idea that digitisation might well extend to the electoral register. Is that still on the cards? Is this something that we may expect to be covered, either positively or negatively, in the Government’s digital strategy paper, when next it appears?
Lord True (Con) [V]
My Lords, I have indicated that the Government do not see attractions in producing a single national electoral register or centralised database. It is one of the aspects of our position that we should not move forward to automatic registration, and there are others. I have to disappoint the noble Lord on that score.