European Union (Future Relationship) Act 2020 (References to the Trade and Cooperation Agreement) Regulations 2021

Lord Wallace of Saltaire Excerpts

Wednesday 21st July 2021 Grand Committee

[Lord Wallace of Saltaire (LD) [V]]

My Lords, this takes me back to when I first started to work on the European Community. The EU is a legal construct; clauses, subclauses, chapters and treaties all matter a great deal—usually in French and English, with others to be carefully compared.

I remind the Minister that, when I started to work on this, Margret Thatcher, the then Conservative Prime Minister, was pushing hard to create a single market by removing non-tariff barriers, which she rightly saw as bigger barriers to trade than tariffs. All Conservative Ministers learned and well understood this. I find it very sad that so many Conservatives and current Ministers appear to have forgotten that a mere 25 to 30 years later.

One of the many things that this Government have declared and then had to go back on is that Brexit is done. We are learning that Brexit is far from done; there is a great deal more to be sorted out. That is of course partly because of the chaotic way in which the TCA was negotiated at the last minute against the deadline—in the clear hope from the Prime Minister, Boris Johnson, that this would leave very little time for Parliament to scrutinise or find holes in it.

Now we have a technical SI on the negative basis to correct some aspects of it. Can the Minister confirm whether he expects there to be further SIs that will deal with minor—or indeed major—amendments to the TCA and, if so, may I warmly suggest that they should in all cases be affirmative SIs? We are trying to redesign our relationship with the European Union and we all have an interest in that relationship not becoming a hostile and ill-tempered one. If we are to achieve that, however, it requires a good deal more to be sorted out, including foreign and security policy co-operation, as the noble Baroness, Lady Wheatcroft, said.

In this respect, the very 19th-century view of the noble Lord, Lord Frost, of sovereignty as much more fundamental than international law is clearly a barrier to reasonable negotiation and reasonable arrangements. We all understand that the greatest difficulty with the Northern Ireland protocol is that, for ideological reasons, the British Government have refused to negotiate a phytosanitary agreement—or veterinary agreement, as the noble Lord, Lord Wigley, called it—on the grounds that this would impinge on British sovereignty, not that the British Government have said, so far, that we wish in any way to move away from existing European regulations. That seems to me to be a triumph of ideology over national interest—and, incidentally, it begins to threaten the union and peace in Northern Ireland.

I have some sympathy for the Minister in his position. Honest Conservatives now working for a chaotic Government—I hope not quite as chaotic as Dominic Cummings claims—must find themselves in some difficulty defending the position of a Government who often deny responsibility for what they negotiated less than three years ago. The Government must take responsibility for their future relations, however much they may wish to tilt towards the Pacific. I have to say that I was very amused to discover the other day that the Government are planning to send fishery protection boats to the Pacific in order to enforce fishery protection there, while we are so short of fishery protection vessels in the UK that we could do with another dozen or two here.

There are a number of illogical elements in this Government, which I am sure the Minister quietly regrets as he loyally continues to serve. Can he assure us that further amendments to the TCA, which we unavoidably expect, will be presented, whenever possible, as affirmative SIs and debated on the Floor of the Chamber? We all have strong interests in this relationship becoming a stable and friendly one, and we are some distance from that yet.

Security of Ministers’ Offices and Communications

Lord Wallace of Saltaire Excerpts

Tuesday 29th June 2021 Lords Chamber

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

My Lords, on private emails, government guidance is that official devices, email accounts and communication applications should be used for communicating classified information. Other forms of electronic communication may be used in the course of conducting government business. Each Minister is responsible for ensuring that government information is handled in a secure way. The specific quantitative points the noble Baroness raised I cannot respond to at this point. But, in answer to another of the noble Baroness’s questions, the official information held in private email accounts is subject to FoI.

[Lord Wallace of Saltaire (LD)]

My Lords, the government guidance seems to be not entirely clear. When Ministers are using private emails for official business, does this mean that their officials, including their own private offices and Permanent Secretaries, have access to these or are they outside the regard of civil servants? Can we be sure that CCTV is securely held? Are private contractors engaged in this? Is the technology—hardware and software—also secure or is some of it procured from, for example, China?

[Lord True (Con)]

My Lords, I apologise to the noble Baroness opposite for not answering the question on CCTV, which was a lapsus memoriae—we are not supposed to use Latin, but it was. As I understand it, the Department of Health is looking into the specifics here. It constitutes a leak and is a serious matter with security implications. I can tell the House that our understanding is that this is certainly not a covert camera, nor is there a general policy of such cameras across Whitehall. As far as the question of emails is concerned, Ministers will have informal conversations from time to time in person or remotely, but significant contact relating to government business from such discussions should be, and is, passed back to officials. That would be in line with the relevant guidance on information handling and security. The Cabinet Office has previously published guidance on how information is held for the purposes of access to information. We obviously review this from time to time. I would expect all Ministers to seek to conform to the guidance.

Constitution Inquiry

Lord Wallace of Saltaire Excerpts

Monday 14th June 2021 Lords Chamber

[Lord True (Con)]

My Lords, the Government will continue to apply the law of the land until the law of the land is changed.

[Lord Wallace of Saltaire (LD)]

My Lords, the commitment to constitutional integrity and the absolute sovereignty of the UK Parliament comprise a piece of legal purism which I think the Government would criticise if the European Commission displayed such a tendency. Does the Minister recognise that the commitment to absolute UK sovereignty was what led to the division of Ireland? Does he not accept that insistence on it with regard to Northern Ireland and Scotland now is likely to lead to further division?

[Lord True (Con)]

No, my Lords, I do not agree. We currently have a constitutional settlement in which there are reserved and devolved matters. I think we all believe that devolution has benefited the United Kingdom, and the Government’s priority—as the priority of all of us should be—is to make that work in amity and with commonality, as we were reminded earlier.

UK–EU Trade and Co-operation Agreement: Meetings of Bodies

Lord Wallace of Saltaire Excerpts

Thursday 27th May 2021 Lords Chamber

[Lord Frost (Con)]

My Lords, I share my noble friend’s distaste for bureaucracy in all its forms, even though I have spent most of my life working in one. It is, unfortunately, a characteristic of international relations nowadays that there is a substantial bureaucratic component, and we have to work with that. I hope that the various committees that have been created will help us to resolve problems. I can reassure my noble friends that the bureaucracy is, at least, much less than when we were a member of the European Union.

[Lord Wallace of Saltaire (LD)]

My Lords, is it the Government’s objective, nevertheless, to get the full panoply of relations and committees working well, as we have to manage a very wide agenda of continuing close relations with the European Union? Do the Government have it in mind that they could take the Swiss option, as it were, and break the series of complex negotiations and treaties that they have with the EU—which, as he will know, the Swiss have just done?

Size of the House of Lords

Lord Wallace of Saltaire Excerpts

Tuesday 18th May 2021 Lords Chamber

[Lord True (Con)]

My Lords, I agree with the noble Baroness that the role of the Official Opposition is extremely important, and new Peers have been appointed —the Prime Minister has nominated people to the Labour Party Benches. Indeed, I had the great privilege of hearing the maiden speech from the noble Baroness, Lady Merron, only last week.

[Lord Wallace of Saltaire (LD) [V]]

My Lords, may I follow the question of the noble Baroness, Lady Smith? The Labour Party acted with great restraint in the first 11 years after the 1999 reforms. It was six years before there were more Labour Peers than Conservative, and at the end of the Labour Government there were only 26 more Labour Peers than Conservatives. We now have 83 more Conservative Peers than Labour, almost as many as there are all other party Peers. Do the Government intend to respect the convention that no group should have a majority in this House or do they intend to carry on appointing more until they approach an overall majority?

[Lord True (Con)]

My Lords, the Conservative Party has only about 33% of the seats in the Lords, which obviously is way short of its share of the vote. This House has always benefited from negotiation and balance. However, there is a fundamental principle of our constitution that the Queen’s Government must be enabled to carry on, and everybody watches very closely the relationship between this House and the House of Commons.

Ministerial Code

Lord Wallace of Saltaire Excerpts

Tuesday 27th April 2021 Lords Chamber

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

My Lords, I assert again the importance of the Ministerial Code, which, as the noble Baroness said, is the responsibility of the Prime Minister of the day. The fact is that Ministers remain in office only for as long as they retain the confidence of the Prime Minister, whose constitutional role means that the management of ministerial appointments is his and is separate from the legislature. On the general running interest that there appears to be in the refurbishment of the Prime Minister’s flat, the costs of the wider refurbishment have been personally met by the Prime Minister. As has been said, the Government have been considering the merits of whether works on parts, or all, of the Downing Street estate could be funded by a trust, and this work is ongoing.

[Lord Wallace of Saltaire (LD)]

My Lords, the Statement refers to Britain as a “robust democracy”. We have done without a written constitution because we have rested on the honour and good conduct of our Ministers and, above all, our Prime Ministers. Can the Minister name any other constitutional democracy, or any other democracy in the world, in which the Prime Minister decides on the rules of ministerial conduct and appoints his own independent adviser without checks and balances from the justiciary or his legislature? Should we not now have to move towards an explicitly constitutional democracy, or risk drifting towards a people’s democracy?

[Lord True (Con)]

My Lords, I am rather old and to me “people’s democracy” conjures up the old eastern bloc. I am interested in high-quality, high-integrity government. The Ministerial Code is the foundation of that. But I must repeat to noble Lords, as I did to the noble Baroness opposite: the constitutional reality is that the appointment of Ministers is in the hands of the Prime Minister of the day. The Government are not considering a change to that position.

Transparency of Lobbying, Non-Party Campaigning and Trade Union Administration Act 2014

Lord Wallace of Saltaire Excerpts

Thursday 22nd April 2021 Lords Chamber

[Lord True (Con)]

My Lords, I make a practice at this Dispatch Box of not throwing stones, and I think everyone in every party should be cautious about throwing stones. In response to what the noble Baroness said—I am sorry that she is in her place, but it is good to see her—on the question of in-house lobbyists, it is true that the Government did not pursue that in 2014. There are issues involved. It obviously will be considered currently. Such an approach would require thousands of businesses, charities, NGOs and trade bodies to pay a registration fee of £1,000 a year to write or speak to Ministers. That could be detrimental to the public interest, but I note what the noble Baroness says.

[Lord Wallace of Saltaire (LD)]

My Lords, I take my share of responsibility for the last Act. It is now clear that we have to extend further the coverage of lobbying activities. Will the Minister accept that these should include greater transparency for political think tanks, including full declaration of their sources of funding? As he will know, Conservative MPs are concerned about the Runnymede Trust. Others of us are concerned about the Institute of Economic Affairs and Policy Exchange, for example, which declare on their websites their access to Ministers and their influence over government policy.

[Lord True (Con)]

My Lords, the noble Lord makes a further suggestion. Since 2010, with the help of the party opposite, we have brought in a statutory registration of consultant lobbyists and a new routine of regular government transparency publications on spending, salaries, contracts and tenders. We are implementing the recommendations of the Boardman review on procurement. We have banned the practice under previous Governments of quangos hiring lobbyists to lobby the Government. We have made sure that taxpayer-funded government grants are not used for lobbying purposes and have provided for greater transparency on trade unions. We have done a number of things. That does not mean that more may not need to be done. I accept that work is ongoing to consider these matters.

Ministerial and other Maternity Allowances Bill

Lord Wallace of Saltaire Excerpts

Committee stage & Committee: 1st sitting (Hansard) & Committee: 1st sitting (Hansard): House of Lords
Thursday 25th February 2021 Lords Chamber

[Lord Morrow (DUP) [V]]

My Lords, I too welcome the Minister’s announcement today and I want to pay tribute to him for his constructive and helpful approach during the week. He is a man who is not afraid to meet and to listen—the hallmark of a good Minister. Much that was going to be said undoubtedly will now not be, and I am aware that that applies throughout the House. However, I do want to make a few brief remarks.

It is difficult to understand why a Bill that relates to maternity leave does not once use the word “woman”. That, as we would say here in Ulster, is quite bizarre. While I support all the amendments, I am down to speak to just one. I have stated that my colleagues and I fully support the legislation; indeed, everyone who has spoken, irrespective of their views about the wording, supports the Bill itself. It is just regrettable that the wording did not come up to the standard that some of us felt we could have supported.

A Bill being fast-tracked always raises my suspicions, and I do wonder why this Bill is being fast-tracked. I know that sometimes there are very good reasons, and I think we all accept that this Bill has to be got through. However, unfortunately, this Bill, which is about ensuring the rights of pregnant women, was quite disrespectful to women in its original wording, in that it referred to them as “persons”. In all good conscience, I could not have supported the language used throughout, which made no mention of “women” anywhere.

The terminology stands in sharp contrast to all other UK legislation affording maternity rights and protection. I refer to the Employment Rights Act 1996 and the Equality Act 2010. Some advocates of inclusion and diversity in Parliament, with whom I would not always agree, have rightly opposed the move towards gender-neutral language, on the basis that you cannot grant new rights to certain groups by taking away the rights enjoyed by others. The Bill would, regrettably, have anonymised and dehumanised the status and life experience of women. But we know that has now been changed, thanks to the Minister’s constructive approach. I believe listening is the sign and hallmark of a good Minister, and the noble Lord, Lord True, has certainly done that.

[Lord Wallace of Saltaire (LD) [V]]

My Lords, this Bill will now pass unamended and I welcome that. But we recognise that our debate has touched on wider issues and that we are likely to return to them, in spite of our agreement on the government concession, on other Bills.

When I first joined this House a quarter of a century ago, it was dominated by men, most of them hereditary Peers. A Conservative woman Peer told me the hereditary Peers in her group treated the women Peers as if they were “day boys”. Having been at a boarding school myself, I knew exactly what this meant. In my first Session, I objected to some sections of that year’s defence review, which included women in the section on “equalities”, but gays in the section on “disciplinary problems”. When I dared to refer to great commanders of the past whose sexuality might have been called into question if aggressive efforts had been made to investigate them, I was attacked from both the Labour and the Conservative Benches and thought it wise to apologise before the debate wound up. Happily, this House and the country as a whole have moved on a great deal since then. We have all become more inclusive and openly diverse. None of us, I hope, wishes to return to the attitudes or the language of that earlier generation.

It is not only in Britain where we have moved towards gender-neutral language in political discourse. In Germany and France, which the noble Lord, Lord Cormack, mentioned, similar changes have been debated and carried into effect. There have been similar protests over attempts at political correctness—although I am not aware that people in France or Germany have taken over the term “woke” from its American origins. The general direction of change has been towards gender neutrality in language, where possible, to remove the implicit biases against women and LGBT people that were often embedded in language.

We all appreciate that this is a sensitive area where passions can easily be aroused. The last thing we want in this country is to slip towards the aggressive culture wars that have been stoked up in the United States, with partisans of opposing viewpoints more interested in the battle itself than in finding common ground, with well-funded organisations feeding the fire. We have all seen American battles spill over into British debate, from the student rebellions and protests that the Vietnam war provoked, to those over Black Lives Matter and opposing interpretations of each country’s history, glorious or inglorious. I hope all of us wish to resist sliding down the road that has led to such bitter divisions in American society, stoked by rival lobbies and highly partisan media. I hope we are all committed to an inclusive society and inclusive language. I also hope we are united in wanting to avoid moves to secure equality for women and moves to provide equal rights to LGBT people being pitched against each other.

Ministerial and other Maternity Allowances Bill

Lord Wallace of Saltaire Excerpts

2nd reading & 2nd reading (Hansard) & 2nd reading (Hansard): House of Lords
Monday 22nd February 2021 Lords Chamber

[Lord Wallace of Saltaire (LD) [V]]

My Lords, we on these Benches welcome the Bill and support its proposals.

It implements proposals made six years ago by the Women in Parliament APPG. As the Minister told us, the Ministerial Code was amended two years ago to accommodate ministerial maternity leave, so the Bill should have been introduced earlier—not rushed through now. I accept its use of gender-neutral language, as recommended in the 2007 legislative guidance, but I note the sensitivity of language at stake here. This clearly needs further discussion but I suspect that it would not be helped by dividing the House at the end of this debate.

The battle to improve maternity conditions for working mothers carries strong personal echoes for me. My wife was a lecturer at the University of Manchester Institute of Science and Technology when we were expecting our first child. At that time, there were no older married women on the academic staff and no arrangements for leave. Helen drove home every lunchtime throughout a university term to breastfeed our daughter. Thankfully, conditions for women giving birth while in work have improved immensely since then, particularly in the Civil Service. I welcome this further step in liberal improvements in the status of women.

However, this welcome comes with a number of critical reservations. As the Minister admitted, the Government are rushing this through to deal with the immediate situation that faces a particular Cabinet Minister. It is almost an ad personam Bill. It does not address parental leave for ministerial fathers. It does not cover adoption. It does not address the issue of sick leave for Ministers, even though this arose for a Cabinet Minister involved in one of the most delicate aspects of the Brexit negotiations—the Northern Ireland issue—in 2018. I regret the absence of these elements from the Bill. I thank the Minister for his pledge to set out the Government’s proposals for covering these other dimensions soon.

The Bill provides for maternity leave to enable a Minister to return to their responsibilities six months later. Such continuity offers an excellent principle for good government; it takes most Ministers a year or more to master the full complexities of their portfolio. Yet we now have a Cabinet almost none of whose members has held office for much more than a year. The current Attorney-General is the third to hold that office since 2015. She sits alongside the fourth Foreign Secretary, the fourth Chancellor and the fourth Secretary of State for Education, and the fifth Business Secretary, since 2015—and now there are rumours of a coming reshuffle. Will the Minister tell us whether his Government intend to allow Ministers to stay in their posts long enough to expect to return from six months’ leave to the same office? Ministerial churn at a rate of nine to 18 months per office is the opposite of good governance.

But my most fundamental criticism is that this is the only constitutionally relevant Bill that we have so far seen in this Parliament, apart from those on Brexit. The Prime Minister promised in the 2019 manifesto that

“After Brexit we also need to look at the broader aspects of our constitution”.


That commitment was widely welcomed across the political spectrum; think tanks even held meetings to discuss what this broad agenda should include. Instead, in the past year the Government have sacked senior civil servants, broken the Ministerial Code, disregarded the recommendation of the House of Lords Appointments Commission, attacked the Electoral Commission, strengthened the Executive at the expense of Parliament, and bypassed democratic local authorities in handling the pandemic. The constitution commission which the Government promised to set up in less than 12 months from the election has been shelved. The Minister has defended this slide from the manifesto commitment without hesitation. He has repeatedly told us that Conservative victory in last December’s election represented the “will of the people”, on 43.5% of the electorate. He has defended behaviour from this Government that John Major—whom he served—would never have contemplated as Prime Minister.

We have watched the US Republican Party slide away from constitutional democracy towards pluto-populism—rich men claiming to represent the will of the people, while breaking the spirit and the letter of constitutional democracy. We see the beginnings of a similar slide here. That is why we need to hold the Government to the manifesto commitment they want to forget.

While I welcome this Bill, I encourage colleagues across the House to hold the Government to account on their neglect of larger constitutional issues, not least because the relationship between England, Scotland and Northern Ireland has been shaken by Brexit, and will not be resolved without further constitutional changes.

Constitution, Democracy and Human Rights Commission

Lord Wallace of Saltaire Excerpts

Thursday 14th January 2021 Lords Chamber

[Lord True (Con)]

My Lords, I have said that the Government are delivering the commitment in the manifesto to look at the broader aspects of the constitution in a range of separate workstreams. Obviously, this and others to be announced in due course will all reflect what the noble Baroness has said and what I have said—indeed, that is the case for those reviews that have been set up already and the cross-party Joint Committee that is looking at the FTPA.

[Lord Wallace of Saltaire (LD) [V]]

My Lords, I wish to repeat what the noble Lord, Lord Young, said in his opening question, which is that any constitutional reform needs to have broad-based support that inspires public confidence. How do the Conservative Party and its associated right-wing think tanks, eating the elephant in chunks and bending the conventions of the constitution in the way that it has in the last year, begin to deal with public alienation from politics and holding the union of Great Britain together?

[Lord True (Con)]

I think that on reflection the noble Lord will think that he does a disservice to those serving on the Independent Review of Administrative Law, those reviewing under Sir Peter Gross the operation of the Human Rights Act and indeed Members of both Houses on the Joint Committee when he characterises them in that way.