Electoral Registration

Lord Wallace of Saltaire Excerpts

Wednesday 22nd January 2014 Lords Chamber

[Lord Wills]

To ask Her Majesty’s Government what plans they have to ensure that electoral registration levels do not decline between the 2010 and 2015 general elections.

[Lord Wallace of Saltaire (LD)]

My Lords, the Government are safeguarding the completeness of the register by using data matching to ensure that the vast majority of existing electors are reregistered in the transition to individual electoral registration. We are phasing the transition over two years, with a carry-forward to allow those not individually registered to vote in the 2015 election. We are making registration more accessible by introducing online registration and are providing additional resources at a national and local level to fund activities to boost the completeness and accuracy of the register to the greatest degree possible.

[Lord Wills (Lab)]

I thank the Minister for that Answer. I welcome all the measures that he has described and all the other measures that the Government have taken to improve the levels of registration. I also recognise his own personal commitment to that goal. However, he must recognise that every independent authority has warned that the approach that the Government are taking to changing the method of registration carries risks to levels of registration among particular groups of people—young people, people with disabilities, ethnic minorities and people living in areas of extreme deprivation. In the light of that, does he recognise that, in what is likely to be a very tightly contested general election next year, levels of registration could significantly skew its outcome? They are likely to benefit one party alone: the Conservative Party. In the light of that, will he give an assurance that he will monitor levels of registration later this year and, if they have declined, will he make more money available to local authorities to increase levels of registration?

[Lord Wallace of Saltaire]

My Lords, I think the noble Lord knows that we are working extremely hard across the board on all this. In the confirmation dry run on data matching, the two boroughs that came out with less than 50% successful data matching were Westminster and Kensington and Chelsea—not exactly the areas with the lowest level of income in the country.

[Lord Maclennan of Rogart (LD)]

My Lords, since the Electoral Commission report in April 2011 indicated that some 17.7% of the eligible electorate were not registered at that time, and my noble friend has indicated that he does not have centrally held information about funding allocated to electoral registration, could he not invite local authorities to indicate to the Government how they are handling this and what money is still required in order to make sure that individual registration is completed by the time of the next general election?

[Lord Wallace of Saltaire]

My Lords, my right honourable friend Greg Clark made a speech to the Association of Local Authority Chief Executives only last week in which he spoke about the provision of targeted additional funding to those local authorities that are shown in the confirmation dry run to have the greatest difficulties. There are now a number of local authorities where, on the data matching, we are already above 85% confirmation, and that is much better than we had initially thought.

[Lord Maxton (Lab)]

My Lords, while it is too late for this for the next general election, surely the Government have to wake up to the fact that we need electronic registration, done with ID cards, and that, by 2020, the general election will be held not only with a register based on ID cards but will be electronic itself.

--- Later in debate ---

[Lord Wallace of Saltaire]

I admire the noble Lord’s commitment to everyone going online; the Government, as noble Lords will know, are encouraging people to go online. As I have said before, a number of social housing authorities are particularly assisting their tenants to use online registration and online communication with the Government. We are working in that direction.

[Lord Forsyth of Drumlean (Con)]

Does my noble friend agree that those political parties that have frustrated the opportunity for the next election to be fought on the basis of fair boundaries, as recommended by the Boundary Commission, are in no position to talk about fairness in elections?

[Lord Wallace of Saltaire]

My Lords, if we were to attempt to discuss fairness in elections in this House, we would spend a very long time not reaching a conclusion.

[Lord Kennedy of Southwark (Lab)]

My Lords, estimates suggest that more than 6 million of our fellow citizens are not eligible to vote because they are not on the electoral register. That is a shocking situation. Can the noble Lord tell the House what the Government are doing to get these people registered? Will he also join me in urging local councils across the United Kingdom to do everything in their power to get people who are eligible to vote on to the register?

[Lord Wallace of Saltaire]

My Lords, I remind the House that it was the previous Government who started the move to individual electoral registration. I also remind the House that the number of people registered has been going down for the past 10 years or more. Research shows that the largest single reason for declining registration is a decline in interest in politics more generally, followed by a more mobile population and the greater difficulties we now have with canvassing. We all share an interest in raising the level of popular interest in politics and making sure that the turnout in the next election is not low.

[Lord Phillips of Sudbury (LD)]

My Lords, on the point that my noble friend has just made about creating an interest in and understanding of politics, will he please ensure that citizenship education of young people in schools is increased? At the moment, that is declining rapidly and it seems wholly counterproductive to his last remark that that should be so.

[Lord Wallace of Saltaire]

My Lords, I entirely take the noble Lord’s point. Next week my right honourable friend Greg Clark will announce partnership arrangements with a number of voluntary organisations to encourage young people to register and take a greater interest in politics.

Credit Unions

Lord Wallace of Saltaire Excerpts

Thursday 16th January 2014 Lords Chamber

[Lord Wallace of Saltaire (LD)]

My Lords, the Government support the work of the credit union sector and are investing up to £38 million in participating credit unions, to expand their service while reducing their delivery costs, by April 2015. The Government will not require departments to offer a facility for payroll deductions for their Civil Service workforce where these do not already exist. It will be for each department to consider the costs and benefits of offering such a facility.

[Lord Kennedy of Southwark (Lab)]

My Lords, your Lordships’ House and the other place have given the Government a good example by setting up this facility a few weeks ago. Would the Minister meet with representatives of the credit union movement and me to explore how this could be rolled out across government? Also, what words does he have to encourage the private sector to offer such services to its staff as well?

[Lord Wallace of Saltaire]

My Lords, I have just read that the noble Lord, Lord Freud, and Mr Iain Duncan Smith have joined the London Mutual Credit Union. It is open to all Members and the staff of both Houses to join that union. Part of the problem, as the noble Lord well knows, is that most credit unions are locally based and for other departments—such as the Home Office or DWP, with employees scattered all the way across the country—the cost of joining employees into a very large number of credit unions is rather complicated.

[Lord Deben (Con)]

My Lords, I wonder whether the Minister would accept that this Government are very much in favour of nudging. How much nudging is going on to get departments to take up this very big issue? The credit union movement is well worth supporting; it is supported on every side. I do not believe that it is helpful just to say that departments can make up their own minds. I hope that we can have some nudging.

[Lord Wallace of Saltaire]

My Lords, there is a lot of nudging going on but, as the noble Lord will know, there are employee-based contributions to credit unions and employer-provided contributions to credit unions. The Government are aware that it is not without cost to run an employer-based set of contributions, particularly, again, if you are trying to roll it out across the entire country, in which there are some 340 locally based credit unions.

[Lord McFall of Alcluith (Lab)]

My Lords, it seems that there is a need for more diversity in financial services. Would it not be a good example if the House were to send out a message that we are leading the way on this? The common bond is government employees, so that should be easy. In terms of pursuing this enthusiastically, could the Minister ensure that a cost-benefit analysis is undertaken and that it is placed in the Library, so that Members can see it and can have a part in ensuring that we push for a credit union and be an example to the rest of the country?

[Lord Wallace of Saltaire]

My Lords, I will take that back and see what we can do about a cost-benefit analysis. I should mention that, apart from the Houses of Parliament, the other department of government that already has an employer-based credit union arrangement in place is the National Offender Management Service. Members will consider whether they think that is a good parallel to our work or not.

[Lord Cormack (Con)]

My Lords, while I am entirely in favour of the “nudging” to which my noble friend Lord Deben referred, what we really want is explicit, enthusiastic public encouragement by government Ministers of this very important movement.

[Lord Wallace of Saltaire]

My Lords, that is exactly the purpose of the credit union expansion plan.

[Baroness Royall of Blaisdon (Lab)]

My Lords, I am very proud to be associated with the scheme that extends also to members of the National Offender Management Service, as I think all Members of this House will be and should be. My noble friend made an important suggestion, namely that arrangements should be made for him, the Minister and somebody from the credit union to have access to somebody in each department to see how this could be pursued further. I would be grateful if the Minister could respond to that point.

[Lord Wallace of Saltaire]

I will take that back. My briefing says that this issue is not without cost in terms of payroll arrangements, but we will consider it and see what can be done.

[Lord Tyler (LD)]

My Lords, following the comments of my noble friend Lord Deben, can we at least expect a bit of joined-up government in terms of nudging different departments? If the difficulty is not one of principle but simply one of practicality, surely if one department can encourage this, others can too.

[Lord Wallace of Saltaire]

My Lords, I think that we are about to trespass on the next debate. The Cabinet Office nudges other departments; whether it can direct them is a question on which the noble Lord, Lord Hennessy, will no doubt touch in a few minutes.

[Lord Elystan-Morgan (CB)]

The Minister will be well aware of the popularity of credit unions in Australia, New Zealand, Canada and particularly the Republic of Ireland, where I think the figure of support is of the order of 50%. Am I right in thinking that the equivalent figure for the United Kingdom is somewhere between 1% and 1.5%?

[Lord Wallace of Saltaire]

My Lords, I have 2% in my brief, but that is still a very small figure. Given the reduction in bank services in a number of areas in this country, this is an issue that we should all encourage. Noble Lords, including the noble Lord, Lord Kennedy, will remember the most reverend Primate the Archbishop of Canterbury talking about the Church of England becoming more extensively involved in the credit union movement.

[Lord Clarke of Hampstead (Lab)]

My Lords, the noble Lord, Lord Cormack, asked for enthusiasm from the Government in this regard. Perhaps they could start by the Minister saying to his noble friend who represents the Department for Education, “Let’s have a go at getting schools interested in credit unions”, as the St Albans credit union has done. That body has had great success in getting youngsters into the habit of saving.

[Lord Wallace of Saltaire]

My Lords, that is another very useful suggestion, which I shall also take back.

The Future of the Civil Service

Lord Wallace of Saltaire Excerpts

Thursday 16th January 2014 Lords Chamber

[Lord Wallace of Saltaire (LD)]

My Lords, that is a pretty firm pass. It is very good to be back after a period away, although this is the first time I will have tried to stand for 20 minutes non-stop. I do not regret the need for this debate and I was rather puzzled that the noble Lord, Lord Hennessy, said that in his opening remarks. It seems to me that it is exactly the job of this House to debate the principles of government to see where we think government may be going wrong. We are, in effect, the institutional memory—though some of us can remember rather more than others. In dealing with a number of papers over the past 10 days, I have been very struck by how the institutional memory does not go back much beyond about 1990; however, mine does, so I was able to say, “No, the problem did not begin then”. That is precisely the sort of thing that we should be doing here.

I should declare a few interests. I am a member of the Civil Service reform board. My wife was a civil servant for seven years, at a time when the Civil Service was pretty unfriendly to women with children. My daughter is a civil servant, at a time when the Civil Service is very friendly to women with children—I am happy to say that that is part of the transformation over the past 30 years.

As a young academic, in 1977 I published a study of Whitehall’s management of Britain’s international relations and then got caught up in a government review, the Berrill report, of much the same thing. I vividly remember being carpeted in the Paris embassy by Sir Nicholas Henderson, who thought that I was a dangerous radical suggesting all sorts of things that would undermine Her Majesty’s Diplomatic Service—and, indeed, the Diplomatic Service saw off the Berrill report pretty firmly. That was a mistake. It is part of the problem that we have with the absence of language skills across the Civil Service at present that we did not think, as the Berrill commission and others like me were saying, that we needed to spread those skills across the Department of Trade and Industry and other departments. The internationalisation of government is one of the revolutions that we have been running through since then.

Over the past 30 or 40 years, Whitehall and the British Government as a whole have had to cope with a whole series of changes. I have mentioned internationalisation, but we have also seen the gradual centralisation of the delivery of public services—first across the country and then with the partial reversal of that in the establishment of the devolved Governments—which has left England as the most centralised country in the advanced industrialised world. I hope that what the coalition Government is now doing with city deals is beginning to reverse that. That will have implications for the central Civil Service.

The expansion of public services, particularly the provision of welfare and health, is running up against the limits of the capacity of government to finance the services being provided. That is one of the underlying problems that any Government of any party will face in the coming years.

Over the past 20 years, there has also been the growth of outsourcing and contract management. The move away from lifetime employment has been a matter not just for the Civil Service but for our entire economy and society. It has been recognised that the accumulation of skills from shifts in post in your career helps you on your way to reaching positions of responsibility at the top—particularly, the need to acquire management skills, which the Civil Service has been much concerned about.

Of course, there is also now the digital revolution. The Government have been behind the private sector in moving from paper to digital exchange, but I am happy to say that through the Cabinet Office—Francis Maude and others—they are doing their utmost to catch up. One of the most effective pieces of insourcing in which this Government have been engaged is the creation of the Government Digital Service. This is made up of a number of bright outsiders who hate wearing ties when they come to work but who are very good at pushing forward the revolution that we need in this respect.

There has also been the revolution of the coalition Government, to which the Civil Service has had to adapt. In my experience, a number of civil servants have adapted extremely well to the tactful ways in which Ministers of two different parties have to be treated. There has been a need for adaptation while, as a number of people have argued, sticking to the core principles of Northcote-Trevelyan.

On the concept of civil servants following the national interest, we no longer talk about them as being “servants of the Crown” but the noble Lord, Lord McNally, talked about the ethos of public service and a sense of altruism as being important parts of what they believe in. That ethos has been undermined to some extent, particularly on the economic right, by the growth of public-choice economics and by the philosophies of Ayn Rand which have come across the Atlantic, but I think that all of us here would hold to the idea that service to the state and the concept of public service are important parts of what holds government, the Civil Service and society together.

The noble Lord, Lord Marlesford, referred to the transformation of the Civil Service in terms of diversity and gender. It is encouraging how many bright young women there are coming up in the Civil Service. I think that eight of the 36 Permanent Secretary posts are now held by women—that is not enough; it was rather more two years ago and we hope that it will again be rather more in a few years’ time. There is real diversity across the sector. When I travel to other countries, it seems to me that at every embassy that I visit the economic counsellor is of south Asian extraction. Lots of bright people, men and women, are coming through the Civil Service. That is one of the achievements in particular of the Blair Government and, within the Foreign Office, of Robin Cook. We recognise that that has helped to take us forward.

On the issue of a parliamentary commission, the Government are not persuaded of the need for a vast commission. The noble Lord, Lord Hennessy, is too young to remember some of the royal commissions of the past. When he was probably still at school, I was a junior adviser to the Crowther-Hunt Royal Commission on the Constitution. If he has the nine volumes on his shelves, he will find in volume VII a paper that I wrote. The commission took several years and almost no one now remembers it. We are hesitant about getting back to the circumstance in which, as they used to say, such commissions “take minutes and years”.

The Prime Minister did say to the Liaison Committee that he is not entirely closed to the idea of further inquiries. As the noble Lord, Lord Norton, suggested, it would be more helpful if we took one chunk at a time rather than tried to take the whole thing. For example, there is the question of the relationship among Ministers, civil servants and Parliament. The noble Lord, Lord Turnbull, talked about the role of junior Ministers and how many we may need, which is a rather fundamental issue for the future of the relationship between Executive and legislature. The noble Lord, Lord Waldegrave, suggested that we look at the future of the Civil Service Commission.

Through committees and in debates, there are a range of things that this House and the other House should be encouraged to do. That is a different exercise from saying that we need to start again and re-examine the principles of Northcote-Trevelyan, of Haldane or indeed of Fulton.

[Lord Butler of Brockwell]

Will the Minister confirm that Parliament can look at these things, in toto or seriatim, only with the consent of the Government? Can we expect that the Government will be more encouraging than they have been so far?

[Lord Wallace of Saltaire]

My Lords, I am not entirely sure what the position on this is, but I suspect that there is a formal position and an informal one. Parliamentary committees inquire into a great many aspects of government, and that is welcome and will no doubt continue. I think that where a good case for a parliamentary inquiry is made, the Government will not obstruct it.

[Lord McNally]

I think that the noble Lord, Lord Norton of Louth, may have been on to something. This House can set up its own committee if the Government were so stubborn as to try to stop any other route. This House can do it and may have to.

[Lord Wallace of Saltaire]

My Lords, the Government are not opposed to intelligent inquiry by Parliament. One of the many things that has changed over the past 40 years is the relationship between Parliament and civil servants. Parliamentary inquiries by my honourable friend Bernard Jenkin’s committee, Margaret Hodge’s committee and others are a regular part of life in a way that they were not 40 years ago. That is a desirable development. We are now having to think about how we rewrite the Osmotherly rules to fit in with this new development.

I have heard a diversity of views in this debate about how far civil servants and senior officials should be directly answerable to Parliament for the major projects that they have been leading. That is another area that is worth examining. After all, we are light years away from the Crichel Down affair, when a Minister resigned over a failure in his department about which he knew little. We would not want go back to that. This is another area where the relationship among Ministers, senior officials and Parliament has evolved, and it will no doubt need to evolve further.

[Lord Forsyth of Drumlean]

I think I heard my noble friend say that the Government were not opposed to a parliamentary inquiry into the Civil Service. Does that mean that, should Parliament decide to set up an inquiry, it would have the support of the Government?

[Lord Wallace of Saltaire]

My Lords, I said that the Government are not opposed to parliamentary inquiries. The Prime Minister is not currently persuaded of the case for a massive commission of inquiry of the sort that my honourable friend Bernard Jenkin’s committee recommended. No doubt there will be further discussion on that and on the sorts of topics that it would be reasonable to address.

I turn to the politicisation of the Civil Service, which a number of noble Lords have touched on and expressed concern about. In my experience over the past three and a half years, I have found special advisers, both those within the Deputy Prime Minister’s Office and those working for Conservative Secretaries of State, to be extremely helpful in easing the relations between the coalition partners and in assisting private offices in the division of work between what is entirely administrative and what becomes political. Perhaps it would be appropriate for a parliamentary committee to look at the expansion of special advisers but I certainly would give evidence in favour of their usefulness in the scene. Whether or not the expanded ministerial office will be that different from what one saw in Gordon Brown’s private office, for example, where the spads were very much part of the office, I am not entirely sure. Again, we should recognise that practice has already evolved and will evolve further.

There has also been concern about the question of choice in Permanent Secretary appointments. We have been round this many times before. I am old enough to remember as a student the great spat between Richard Crossman and his Permanent Secretary. Since then, a number of Secretaries of State—Jack Straw and others—have insisted that they have in effect chosen their Permanent Secretaries. This is an area in which it seems that the recent suggestion that the Prime Minister should have the ultimate say on the appointment of a Permanent Secretary is an acceptable move in this evolving set of relations.

The move to fixed-tenure Permanent Secretary appointments also seems a worthwhile step forward. We are conscious that there has been a fairly rapid turnover in the past two years, although I point out that the average tenure of Permanent Secretaries currently in place and those who have retired since 2010 is about four years. This is not too violent a change.

How do we strengthen Civil Service accountability? That takes us to the Osmotherly rules and the question of how far Parliament and parliamentary committees should be examining officials directly. We have already gone a long way down that road, as we well know. That requires some further study and investigation because of course one wants to protect officials from too aggressive parliamentary scrutiny. That question therefore relates to Parliament as much as Ministers.

The Civil Service reform plan has been very much concerned with the capabilities, skills and training of the senior Civil Service and with contract management and improving commercial skills. I said to one of my former students the other day that I was not entirely sure about the recommendation that there should be substantial additional payments for some senior officials. I had my ear chewed off by a bright young civil servant who said that we need to buy in commercial and management skills from time to time and if we have to pay more for them it is worth doing. That, after all, is part of what we are now trying to do.

We are carrying through the digital revolution. I have just written a rather sharp note to the Department for Transport about some of the design problems in the DVLA online form for over-70s renewing their driving licence, and had an extremely good reply from the Secretary of State. We are improving, as noble Lords know. The gov.uk website received an award last year.

The role of the head of the Civil Service has also been touched on. Over the years, we have moved from a combined head of the Civil Service and Cabinet Secretary to occasional splits between the two. From my time on the Civil Service Board, it seems to me that the current division works well. Others in later periods may differ again, but that is the preference of the current Government.

Having now worked in five different departments in the past four years, I am concerned about the gap between the departments and the centre. The obscurantism of one or two departments—unnamed—is worrying. The difference in quality of civil servants at the middle level in a number of departments is worrying. Therefore, I am strongly in favour of providing more shared services from the centre as we hope to shrink the central administration and push more delivery down to the local level.

This has been a worthwhile debate. I come back to where I started: the noble Lord, Lord Hennessy, should not regret having to call for a debate such as this. It is very much the job of the House of Lords to hold debates about the structure of government and the nature of the state. That should be part of our prime purpose. There is an awful lot of institutional memory inside this Chamber. Sometimes perhaps we think that there was a golden age or that we would like the world to be the way it was 20 to 30 years ago, without fully recognising the challenges we have now. Nevertheless, we have a great deal to contribute.

I thank all those who have contributed, one or two of whom I can remember interviewing when I was a junior academic—

[Lord Forsyth of Drumlean]

Before the noble Lord concludes, will he deal with the serious point I made in my speech, which the noble Lord, Lord Kerr, also raised, about the upholding of the Civil Service Code and the failure of that to be done in Scotland, and the responsibility that lies with the head of the Civil Service in England because of the precedents it will create to deal with this?

[Lord Wallace of Saltaire]

My Lords, I would prefer to write to the noble Lord on that extremely sensitive issue. I think he will understand why. Such matters under the Civil Service Code are for the Scottish Government in the first instance and will be dealt with by the relevant Permanent Secretary. But I will go back and write to him. I know where he is coming from and the point he is trying to make.

We have had a worthwhile debate. It is very good to have a range of different contributions from people who have seen the evolution of British government—

[Lord Elton (Con)]

My Lords, I am sorry to interrupt, but will the noble Lord add the usual assurance that he will provide a copy of that letter to the Library?

--- Later in debate ---

[Lord Wallace of Saltaire]

I will certainly provide a copy of the letter to the Library.

I look forward to the next debate in this House on the Civil Service and perhaps to the ad hoc committee that the noble Lord, Lord Norton of Louth, might succeed in persuading the authorities to have. This is a subject that we need to continue to discuss, although not necessarily through establishing very large and long-lasting joint parliamentary commissions.

Electoral Registration and Administration Act 2013 (Transitional Provisions) Order 2013

Lord Wallace of Saltaire Excerpts

Monday 9th December 2013 Grand Committee

Moved by

[Lord Wallace of Saltaire]

That the Grand Committee do report to the House that it has considered the Electoral Registration and Administration Act 2013 (Transitional Provisions) Order 2013.

Relevant document: 9th Report from the Joint Committee on Statutory Instruments

[Lord Wallace of Saltaire (LD)]

My Lords, the statutory instruments before us today provide the detail of the transition to and operation of individual electoral registration, which replaces the current household registration system. The description of electoral registers and amendment regulations also make changes relating to the edited versions of the electoral register and to elements of the conduct of elections.

I welcome the noble Lord, Lord Kennedy of Southwark, to this long-running saga. We considered first what became the Electoral Registration and Administration Act, and then the numerous statutory instruments that followed. The Bill team assures me that there are no more than 29 to come. The good news that we have today is that the data-matching exercise has turned up around 78% of voters being matched through the system. The query attached to that is that the data matching is much higher in areas that have a static population than in areas that have either a mobile population or a large number of second homes. That is why Argyll and Bute comes 20th in the list of lowest matching areas but urban areas and areas with a high number of students are also among those where the percentage of data matching comes out much lower than in other areas.

To ensure that as many existing electors as possible remain on the register during the transition, the Government announced in their official response to pre-legislative scrutiny on IER that part of the transition would involve a data-matching stage where all electoral registers in Britain would be matched against trusted public data sets. Where a positive match is made between an entry on the register and information in the data set, that person may be confirmed. The dry run, as I have already said, found that about 78% on average of those submitted to the Department for Work and Pensions could be confirmed by data matching. The results were better than we originally anticipated.

Furthermore, using a combination of national and local data could lead to an even greater overall average match rate of as much as 85%. This high rate means that fewer electors will need to make IER applications during the transition. EROs will then be able to focus their resources on unconfirmed electors and those eligible citizens who were not on the register already. As we have discussed before, we already have an existing problem in that the number of voters who are not on the existing register has steadily grown over the past 10 years.

Cabinet Office officials have recently written to each local authority, giving them their indicative funding for implementing IER next year. Each allocation is based in part on the results of the confirmation dry run to ensure that sufficient funding is provided for the work required of each ERO to produce as complete and accurate an electoral register as possible as we move to the new system. The Government expect the allocation to cover all the costs in the majority of authorities but will consider funding additional costs in individual cases if they are precisely and strongly supported by evidence and have not already been recognised.

Each of the instruments before us today relates wholly or partly to IER. The transitional provisions order sets out the activities unique to the transition—due to begin in June 2014 in England and Wales and after the referendum of September 2014 in Scotland. Many of the regulations in the description of electoral registers and amendment regulations set out the operation of IER from that date, through transition and into the period of business as usual. Under these regulations, each ERO will still be required each year to carry out a full annual canvass of households, sending out a canvass form to every residential property.

Unlike the process under the household registration system, completing this form will not get a new elector on to the register. A household inquiry form will be used to find out who is resident. If people have not moved, they will be retained without further action being required beyond returning the form or informing the ERO that there has been no change, just as under the current system. However, if the residents recorded on the returned form have changed, any new electors will need to apply individually to register.

As is currently the case, there will be a duty on EROs to follow up where they get no response to these canvass forms: the household inquiry forms. If no information is forthcoming, a further form will be sent. If necessary, a third form will be sent and a canvasser must visit the property. The occupier or the person responsible for the property will have a duty to respond. The existing criminal offence for not responding will continue to apply. Where an ERO finds out about a person who appears to be eligible, whether through the household inquiry form or through other information, they must invite that person to register. As with the household inquiry form, the ERO must also follow up any non-response to an individual invitation to register and may require the person to make an application. In addition to the criminal offence of failing to respond to a household inquiry form, the ERO has the option to impose a civil penalty on an individual who fails to apply if required to do so.

The application to register is a key part of IER. It is central to the individual nature of the new system as it means that each elector who is added to the register will have made their own application to register. It is also vital that it is convenient for applicants both in the information required and in its design. The Electoral Commission is currently working on the forms for IER, which include the new household inquiry form, the letter inviting a person to register and the IER application. Officials in the Cabinet Office are working closely with the EC on the development of these forms, which are being user-tested to ensure that they are convenient for electors and minimise inadvertent errors in applications.

For the first time, online registration will be enabled, thus modernising the registration process and making it more accessible, especially for those registering from outside the UK, such as service personnel and other overseas electors. Paper forms will be retained for those who prefer that method of registration. As part of the commitment to tackle fraud, a central feature of the new application forms and of the online application portal also enabled by these regulations is that applicants must provide personal identifiers—namely, their date of birth and national insurance number. These will be used to verify their identity through data matching against records held by the Department for Work and Pensions. Electoral Commission research shows that 95% of people would be able to provide their NINo if required. If they cannot, applicants will be advised where they can locate it.

However, it may be that someone cannot provide their date of birth or NINo, that they are in the minority of applicants whose details do not match DWP records, or that the ERO considers for some other reason that additional evidence is necessary to verify the applicant’s identity. For these situations, the regulations set out a robust but accessible exceptions process using prescribed documentary evidence or attestation by another elector in the same area who is of good standing in the community.

This has been a very brief description of how the new system will work. Where households have not moved or changed in composition, they will need simply to complete a household form or inform the ERO, just as they do currently. For new applicants, this new, separate application will be needed. Making the transition from the current system to IER is a significant change, and we have included steps in the transitional provisions order to ensure that it is as convenient as possible for voters.

I have already described how we will use data matching to confirm a large majority of existing electors on the register at the start of transition. Following this data matching, every elector will receive a letter. Most electors will be informed that no further action is required but a minority will be invited to register. They will then have until December 2015—more than a year, in most cases—to apply under IER.

In houses where electors registered during the postponed 2013 canvass, the letters to individuals will, for this canvass only, replace the requirement to send a household inquiry form. Where electors have not been heard from since 2012 and were carried forward during the postponed canvass, or there is no one registered at a property, the ERO will send a household form. It also has the flexibility to send these forms where it thinks that this is the best way to find out about new electors—for example, in areas with high population turnover.

Electors who returned forms in the 2013 postponed household canvass will remain on the register throughout the transition. People who have not yet registered through an IER application or been confirmed by data matching will be able to cast a vote in the 2015 general election on the basis of their pre-IER registration. However, as the fraud risk is most acute around postal voting, only those who are individually registered will be able to cast an absent vote once the revised register is published in December 2014 in England and Wales, and on 28 February 2015 in Scotland. Voters who are absent, with postal or proxy votes, will be informed of the need to make a new application if they have not been confirmed or have not made a successful IER application.

The Representation of the People (Provision of Information Regarding Proxies) Regulations 2013, which are UK-wide, allow EROs to check that someone resident in another area is or will be a registered elector and therefore eligible to act as a proxy when appointed to do so by an elector in the ERO’s area. In other words, someone who casts a proxy vote for someone else has herself or himself to be on the UK electoral register. In the 2015 canvass period, EROs will send a household enquiry form to every residential property as usual. They are also required to send out another invitation to those remaining electors who were not confirmed by data matching in 2014 and who have not yet made a successful IER application.

As the then Minister for Political and Constitutional Reform told the House of Commons, and as set out in our implementation plan, the Government’s aim is to conclude the transition to IER after the 2015 canvass period. We are confident that those non-IER entries remaining on the register at that point will be out of date or inaccurate. The Minister of the day will have to lay, and Parliament approve, an order in the summer of 2015 to enable the end of the transition in that year; otherwise it will continue until the end of the 2016 canvass. The decision will be for the Minister and the Parliament of the day after the 2015 general election, but I am confident that they will be content with the progress of the transition and will bring it to an end in 2015, which will mean that the register published in December that year will be made up of individually registered electors only.

The Representation of the People (England and Wales) (Description of Electoral Registers and Amendment) Regulations 2013 introduce a number of measures designed to make sure that electors can make a fully informed choice about whether their details appear in the edited register. Among other changes, electors’ edited register preferences will be carried forward indefinitely, so electors will no longer be asked to opt out each year. The changes provide for improved descriptions of the two registers that will ensure that the information for electors is as clear and user-friendly as possible, and a new, more transparent name: the open register.

The same regulations make a number of improvements to the running of elections that are designed to help voters participate effectively in elections and reinforce further the integrity of the voting process. The proposed changes implement electoral administration and conduct provisions in the Electoral Registration and Administration Act 2013. The changes will enable postal votes to be despatched further in advance of polling day, which will be of particular help to those in remote locations, such as persons overseas, including service voters, as more time will be given for them to receive, complete and return their postal vote to be counted. We are also making improvements to the design and layout of voting forms that are intended to make the voting process more accessible and easier to understand.

Provisions on these matters were included in amendments previously made to the European Parliamentary Elections (Amendment) Regulations 2013 in order to apply the provisions to the European Parliamentary elections in 2014. These amendments have recently been debated by Parliament, which has thus had an opportunity to consider the changes. I do not therefore need or intend to go into detail on them today, although I will, of course, be happy to answer any questions on them. I beg to move.

--- Later in debate ---

[Lord Wallace of Saltaire]

My Lords, I am grateful for almost everything that has been said in this debate. We all agree, as the noble Lord, Lord Lipsey, said, that it is extremely important, first, to get maximum registration, and then to get maximum turnout. We also accept that both of these are difficult and have become more difficult; and that the question of the legitimacy of government is, of course, caught up in this. We are all well aware that we might possibly elect a Labour Government at the next election with 35% of the votes cast on a very low turnout. I can imagine what the Daily Mail would say about the legitimacy of that Government.

We have a shared interest across all parties, first, to make sure that we maximise registration and then—this is something on which we need to have some active cross-party conversations—persuade our deeply alienated electorate, let alone our deeply hostile media, that politics is an honourable profession; that voting is important; and that maximising the turnout at the next election has to be seen as a civic duty and not as something that, as some newspaper columnists tend to suggest, will only encourage the bastards.

[Lord Wills]

I am very grateful for what the Minister has just said and want to associate myself with those remarks profoundly. I would like to “mark his card” with a particular potential problem on which I hope the parties could collaborate. That is the problem about funding for electoral registration in this context. As the Minister will know, it is not ring-fenced—although I personally believe that it should be. However, because it is not ring-fenced, local authorities under a lot of pressure might well be tempted to skimp, shall we say, on some of the efforts made. The problem could arise, therefore—and it is only a potential problem at the moment—that local authorities with a particular political complexion will not necessarily see it as in their interests to canvass areas that support the other parties. I am sure that the Minister can imagine the sort of scenarios that could occur.

At the moment, there is no protection against that happening. I am not saying that it will happen. Most local authorities in my experience as a Minister were extremely diligent and took their democratic duties extremely seriously. I would be very surprised if it was a widespread problem, but it could be a problem. I welcome the comments just made by the Minister and his reassurance that he will at least explore what might be done to protect against that sort of eventuality.

[Lord Wallace of Saltaire]

My Lords, I hesitate to get into a discussion on ring-fencing, which the noble Lord and I have debated several times before. The good news is that the data matching so far has come up with a much higher proportion than we originally anticipated. That will enable us to focus funding on those vulnerable groups and particular areas that we now know to be the most difficult. We all understand which those groups are. They are young men above all—young men who tend not to open letters and who move around very rapidly—students, young black voters, and other challenging groups of one sort or another. That is the area on which we are currently concentrating. I say to the noble Lord, Lord Roberts, and others that the Government are co-operating actively with Bite the Ballot, Operation Black Vote and other organisations that are working to increase the intention and willingness to register within their own communities. We are also working with universities and students to ensure that they, too, are able to raise interest and maximise the registration of those groups in their areas. We are well aware of this and we are doing everything we can.

The noble Lord, Lord Lipsey, asked whether we were going ahead for 2015. So far, things are going better than anticipated. We have not completely gone snap on it, but the IT has demonstrated more resilience than we feared might be the case, so it is on track. I am grateful for the noble Lord’s comments on the open register. There are some wider considerations here, as we all understand, such as the questions of credit references and identity verification for mortgages, and other such things. There is also an issue about overseas voters, since they will be asked to demonstrate that they have been, within the past 15 years, resident somewhere in a particular constituency. All of these things fit in with maintaining an accurate register, let alone the question of longer historical research, which relates to the future of the census—another complicated area on which I will not go into more detail here.

Yes, of course we will review the situation after 2015, and we will be absolutely concerned to do whatever we can about service registration. The question of service voting and registration is becoming a little less difficult than it has been, because as troops return from Afghanistan and from Germany, the proportion of our serviceman living outside this country is going through a relatively rapid decline. Of course they will continue to move around, but arrangements for Armed Forces voters and their spouses will be maintained in as strong a form as we possibly can.

We are absolutely concerned to get good young people’s registration forms. I have already mentioned our work with universities and other groups. The noble Lord, Lord Wills, talked about access to the Government’s risk register. Again, we have discussed this before and I have reiterated that the Government work through a risk register as a matter of course but do not publish it. We have just all agreed where we know the risks are in this shift in registration, but I have to reiterate that we knew where many of these risks were already. It is relevant that we have already had increasing problems with young men, people living in rented accommodation and ethnic minority voters. Those existed already; we simply have to work harder to get through to all of them; that is why we are targeting our efforts.

[Lord Wills]

Very briefly, everyone knew where the risks were with the current system of registration. The question I have been trying to get the Government to address is: does the way in which they are proceeding to introduce individual registration increase those risks, maintain the same level of risk or decrease the risks? Which is it?

[Lord Wallace of Saltaire]

My Lords, our efforts are intended to mitigate a risk that was already increasing and is likely to increase further. We will continue to need to look at a range of issues. I am well aware that a Labour Private Member’s Bill, which has been presented two or three times in the House of Commons, suggests, for example, that benefit seekers should not be able to receive their benefits unless they are on the electoral register. This provision is not included in the Bill. It is something that the noble Lord may wish to pursue further. There is a range of questions that we still need to consider, but he and I know how difficult this is: first, getting these people on the register and then persuading many of them to vote.

The noble Lord, Lord Kennedy, asked how aware we were of the importance of the register for December 2015, because it is likely to be the basis on which the redistribution of seats next time around will be drawn. Again, this is not a new problem. We are already aware that there has been underregistration in a number of cities—a number of safe Labour seats, one has to say. To the extent to which we have managed to raise the level of registration, we will raise it on a much fairer basis for the next redistribution of seats. Again, we all recognise, on a cross-party basis, that these things go together, and that we share an interest in making sure that as many of these vulnerable groups as possible are persuaded to register.

The last question from the noble Lord, Lord Kennedy, was: who is a person of good standing? I am tempted to say that it is clearly a university professor. However, I take the question as he put it and I promise to write, particularly on the question of how many times the same person can sign a form on behalf of someone else before the ERO begins to question whether they are an appropriate person to sign the form. I am aware of where he is going with that question and I will do my best to answer it. I hope that I have answered all the questions that noble Lords raised, and I beg to move.

[Lord Kennedy of Southwark]

My Lords, I thank the Minister for his responses, which I am happy with. I did ask some other questions, but I take it that he will respond to them in writing.

[Lord Wallace of Saltaire]

Of course.

Motion agreed.

Representation of the People (England and Wales) (Description of Electoral Registers and Amendment) Regulations 2013

Lord Wallace of Saltaire Excerpts

Monday 9th December 2013 Grand Committee

Moved by

[Lord Wallace of Saltaire]

That the Grand Committee do consider the Representation of the People (England and Wales) (Description of Electoral Registers and Amendment) Regulations 2013.

Relevant document: 11th Report from the Joint Committee on Statutory Instruments.

Motion agreed.

Representation of the People (Scotland) (Description of Electoral Registers and Amendment) Regulations 2013

Lord Wallace of Saltaire Excerpts

Monday 9th December 2013 Grand Committee

Moved by

[Lord Wallace of Saltaire]

That the Grand Committee do consider the Representation of the People (Scotland) (Description of Electoral Registers and Amendment) Regulations 2013

Relevant document: 12th Report from the Joint Committee on Statutory Instruments

Motion agreed.

Representation of the People (Provision of Information Regarding Proxies) Regulations 2013

Lord Wallace of Saltaire Excerpts

Monday 9th December 2013 Grand Committee

Moved by

[Lord Wallace of Saltaire]

That the Grand Committee do consider the Representation of the People (Provision of Information Regarding Proxies) Regulations 2013.

Relevant document: 11th Report from the Joint Committee on Statutory Instruments

Motion agreed.

Equality (Titles) Bill [HL]

Lord Wallace of Saltaire Excerpts

Friday 6th December 2013 Lords Chamber

[Lord Trefgarne]

If a Bill were to come forward simply to deal with my noble friend Lord Shrewsbury—or to deal among other things with my noble friend Lord Shrewsbury—it would be a hybrid Bill. Does my noble friend recall the difficulties of getting hybrid—

[Lord Wallace of Saltaire (LD)]

My Lords, perhaps it might help to bring the Committee to a degree of order if we allow the noble Earl, Lord Caithness, to move his amendment before we get into detailed discussion. I do not think he has yet moved it.

[The Earl of Caithness]

I am speaking to it and have a lot more to say. I know it is Friday afternoon and my noble friend on the Front Bench wishes to go home, but I have been working on this Bill for a couple of weeks, and I am not going to miss my opportunity.

Amendment 1 and my subsequent amendments are about the definition of hereditary titles. The Bill is quite clear that baronetcies include Irish baronetcies, but Clause 1 relates to the peerages of England, Scotland, Great Britain or the United Kingdom only. In fact, this is already a hybrid Bill because it incorporates the baronetcies of Ireland but not the peerages of Ireland. That is the effect of Amendment 4. It is particularly relevant for my noble friend Lord Clancarty. He is the Earl of Clancarty as well Baron Kilconnel and Viscount Dunlo—but they are separate titles in the peerage of Ireland. So there is a complication in excluding Ireland.

Amendment 4 shows that Amendment 1 is very relevant, because you need to define a hereditary title. If you do not define it, you face a gamut of things. Indeed, the noble Earl, Lord Erroll, has an amendment—I have similar amendments—that tries to include some hereditary titles from the Crown or state. That is a separate argument, and we will come to it.

The huge complication of the Bill as it stands is the definition of “hereditary title”. I wish to simplify that. I wish to include peerages, including Irish peerages, and baronetcies and leave it at that. I beg to move.

--- Later in debate ---

[Lord Stevenson of Balmacara (Lab)]

I came into this debate believing that a vow of omerta would probably be the best approach, and I intend to stick to that. However, I wanted to upset the noble Earl on his happy day. I am afraid that as my noble friend Lord Dubs just said, he is confusing several things. The position that we have adopted is as stated by my noble friend Lord Dubs: in relation to the way in which titles are transferred we believe in equality and we will support that. We do not believe in the hereditary principle, therefore his continuous presence in this House is something we would oppose.

[Lord Wallace of Saltaire]

My Lords, it is valuable to treat this Committee stage as a discussion about titles and the question of discrimination. The noble Baroness, Lady Deech, talked about stripping away all the carbuncles. I hesitate a little on that, partly because the British constitution consists of a great many carbuncles. The application of rational design to the British constitution would sweep us away in its turn, which we know the majority of Members of this House are very strongly opposed to.

I was here when the Government announced that the office of Lord Chancellor was to be abolished. They thereupon discovered that the office of Lord Chancellor—a very ancient office—had a whole cast of obligations attached to it which was extraordinarily difficult to get rid of. That is why we still have, for different purposes, the office of Lord Chancellor combined with the Secretary of State for Justice.

The Government’s principle on this Bill is that we welcome the discussion of the elimination of discrimination as far as titles are concerned. My understanding on titles is that all honours stem from the Crown. I am therefore not entirely sure that titles are matters of property. One of the issues that we are debating in the Bill that stands behind this one in the queue is the question of whether the Duchy of Cornwall is a private property or a type of public property.

[Baroness Deech]

On a point of order: according to the Crown office—and it should know—it is written in Halsbury’s Laws of England, 5th edition, Volume 79, paragraph 808:

“A peerage is an incorporeal and impartible hereditament, inalienable …”

It is real property akin to land. Of course, even if the Royal Prerogative enters into this, I think it is a lawyer’s point that a parliament can change or nibble away at or remove parts of the Royal Prerogative, so I hope that will not stand in the way.

[Lord Wallace of Saltaire]

I thank the noble Baroness for that. I recognise her legal expertise in this area. I say to the noble Lord, Lord Trefgarne, that I have not entirely followed the Spanish Government’s debates, and I am sure he could also inform us on the Dutch, Belgian, Italian and Swedish debates on what happens on titles. I can recall a most wonderful evening in Rome, talking to Italian liberals—a nearly endangered species—hosted by a wonderful woman called La Contesssa Machiavelli. This was not at all the content I had in my mind at all. If we are going to make comparisons on titles, there are a lot more: I am not sure whether Andorra—

[Lord Trefgarne]

My intervention is on the Spanish example. They are the only recent Government to have created a new hereditary peerage. It was a new hereditary marquisate conferred upon the coach of a football team.

[The Earl of Caithness]

My noble friend will remember that Mrs Thatcher, as Prime Minister, created two hereditary peerages: the late Lord Tonypandy and our late noble friend Viscount Whitelaw.

[Lord Wallace of Saltaire]

The Government are committed to equality of treatment before the law, and we have demonstrated this in the legislation that the Government have already taken through this House and the other place, including the Succession to the Crown Act, which removed the male bias with regard to the descent of the Crown and the Marriage (Same Sex Couples) Act. We are not, however, persuaded that this Bill provides the most appropriate mechanism to address inequalities within the hereditary title system. I suggest that, before any such system be introduced, we need an extensive consultation with affected parties. That said, it is clear that many noble Lords who have spoken today support the equalisation of inheritance in regard to hereditary titles, and these amendments have provoked a debate on that, which will no doubt continue.

[The Earl of Caithness]

My Lords, I am grateful to all noble Lords who took part, and I am sorry that the noble Lord, Lord Stevenson, tried to ruin my day. However, I say to him that, by allowing the eldest child, female or not, to inherit an hereditary title, you are going to perpetuate hereditary titles that would have died out with a male-only rule. That is to me a consolation.

May I ask my noble friend Lord Wallace, referring to my Amendment 4—which I will come to move in due course because I am only speaking to it at the moment— whether the Bill is hybrid at present as it includes Irish baronetcies, but not Irish peerages? Do we have a hybrid Bill at the moment?

[Lord Wallace of Saltaire]

My Lords, I am informed that this is not a matter for the Government. It certainly seems that if the object is to extend equality, the provision should apply to all those peerages created by the current and all previous monarchs of England and the United Kingdom, and therefore include the peerage of Ireland.

[Lord Trefgarne]

I am bound to say that some of us in this House have a little experience—somewhat distant experience now, I must say—of hybrid Bills and what the implications are. It is a serious matter. I believe that there is a procedure for referring a Bill to a Select Committee to consider whether it is or is not hybrid and to decide how to proceed. There are people called examiners, I seem to recall. It is probably one of our distinguished clerks, I imagine, who sits on a committee to examine all these matters. I do not wish to suggest that we unduly delay this Bill by such a process, but others may take a different view.

--- Later in debate ---

[Lord Trefgarne]

My Lords, I presume I am right in thinking that we are considering the amendment in the name of the noble Earl, Lord Clancarty, and not that in the name of the noble Earl, Lord Erroll.

[Lord Wallace of Saltaire]

My Lords, I merely wish to say that we are in the process of discovering the sheer complexity of what we are discussing. The Government’s objective is to ensure equality before the law. Therefore, the provisions should appropriately be applied broadly but we are beginning to discover just how complex the slightly different laws of England and Scotland are on this matter. I recall that when I was nominated to this House, the Lord Lyon King of Arms wanted to make absolutely sure that my title did not entrench upon anything to do with the Wallaces in Scotland. It was a very interesting overlap. I shall google St Moluag this afternoon just to check exactly who he was. I intend to use it in the next pub quiz I take part in as a test question.

[Lord Lucas]

My Lords, I am conscious that, as a Private Member’s Bill, this should be kept simple and of defined extent. Much as I am tempted to go into the nature of arms and all the rules that apply, I have to admit that I know so little that I would not detain your Lordships long if I did. It would be wise to keep this out of a Private Member’s Bill, for the same reason that I am quite attracted by the amendment in the name of the noble Earl, Lord Erroll, should he choose to press it. It defines the Bill more closely and makes it clearer.

--- Later in debate ---

[Lord Lucas]

My Lords, I have enormous sympathy with the noble Earl, Lord Clancarty, and the simplicity of what he proposes. However, we then need some way back for existing arrangements, such as that suggested by my noble friend Lord Jopling. The difficulty with my noble friend’s amendment is that it does not allow for anything to be done by families who want to change now and who are prepared not to wait until everybody is dead.

I would therefore move my Amendment 46, and consequential Amendments 69 and 70. They adopt the position which would arise from the amendment of the noble Earl, Lord Clancarty, plus that of my noble friend Lord Jopling: the succession to eldest child, irrespective of gender, would start when everyone now living was dead, but families would be allowed to gather together and say, “Actually, we would like this to happen now”, so that we get some sense of change.

My noble friend Lord Trefgarne is quite right that there are a lot of complications in the peerage; sadly, that is not the case with mine—there are no great estates to cause that. However, complications exist, and if we try to trample on those sorts of arrangements we shall only get trouble. We must therefore allow for some mechanism for those to expire over time, although, certainly in respect of my own peerage, I would like to see the change coming as soon as possible.

[Lord Wallace of Saltaire]

My Lords, I reiterate the Government’s support for equality in its broadest sense, and therefore equality in titles of one sort or another is something which we support in principle. The noble Lord, Lord Jopling, invited the Government to produce at speed a Bill on this issue. Since I have spent the past six weeks consulting on a Bill which the Government produced last summer, and which a number of outside organisations have said should have been subjected very carefully to pre-legislative scrutiny, et cetera, I would not recommend that the Government be in a hurry to produce a Bill on this complex area.

We have heard over the debates on the first few amendments just how complex this whole area is. If we wish to proceed, the way to do so, I would have thought, would be consultation followed by a committee or commission of some sort to make sure that we fully understand what one might be doing.

I have already referred to the previous Government’s attempt to abolish the Lord Chancellorship in one day, and the subsequent discovery that the antiquity of the Lord Chancellorship meant that it had accumulated a great many of the carbuncles to which the noble Baroness, Lady Deech, referred. Therefore, if we are to proceed further on this, we should take our time, look very carefully at the implications—the difference between the English, Scottish, Irish and other dimensions of this—and then perhaps consider further.

[Lord Trefgarne]

My Lords, if the Minister is proposing a Royal Commission on this matter, that is an admirable proposal and a number of us here would be happy to volunteer to be chairman.

Armed Force: Constitution Committee Report

Lord Wallace of Saltaire Excerpts

Thursday 28th November 2013 Lords Chamber

[Lord Wallace of Saltaire (LD)]

My Lords, the Government welcome the report of this committee. As noble Lords will be aware, the Commons comparable committee, to which I gave evidence last month, is now compiling a similar report. We hope that that committee’s report will be published within the next few weeks and that it will take our debate a little further forward. The Government will reflect on both reports and respond to the Commons committee report. I have no doubt that in the course of the next year our conversation will move on.

As outlined in their response to this report, the Government are extremely grateful for the committee’s thorough and thoughtful consideration. As the committee recognises, the decision to deploy UK troops in overseas conflicts is one of the most difficult and important that a Government can take. We all recognise that the shadow of the decisions on Iraq, and the fact that the available information which led to the decision on Iraq was not entirely full, is part of the context in which we have been discussing this ever since.

In 2011, the Government acknowledged that a convention had evolved whereby the House of Commons should have the opportunity to debate and vote on such deployment decisions before troops were committed, except when there was an emergency and such action would therefore not be appropriate. Our commitment to that convention was demonstrated most recently by the Government’s decision to request the recall of Parliament on 29 August this year to debate the role that the UK should play in relation to the conflict in Syria, and then to respect the will of the House of Commons expressed by the subsequent vote. The committee’s report concludes that that convention provides the best framework for the House of Commons in which to exercise political control over, and confer legitimacy on, decisions to deploy UK forces in overseas conflicts.

There have been, in this debate, a number of interventions saying that we needed to go further and that we should formalise that convention through a resolution of the House of Commons, although there has been a great deal of sympathy in this debate for the view that formalisation through statute would perhaps attempt to make things too solid in a situation where, as the noble Lord, Lord King, remarked, the definition of armed conflict and the decisions about deployment we are taking could take many forms. Those include whether or not one puts troops on the ground, sends cruise missiles or drones or sends a training unit to Mali, supported by a couple of transport planes, to deal with a situation in which one is dealing not with conflict, let alone with forces of another state, but with armed groups operating across borders in states which do not entirely control their own territory and one does not know how far they may have to go once they are there. That is very much where we are now.

I have immense admiration for the noble Lord, Lord Hennessy, and indeed I recall a stage in 1996 when we regarded him as so much the living embodiment of the British constitution that my party arranged for him to give a lecture on how coalition government might be formed, because we thought that his would be an authoritative view if we found we had to do so. I say to him that the idea that any Government could now say, before committing troops to armed conflict, that we knew how long they might be deployed for, let alone what the exit strategy might be, does not fit with where we now find ourselves. Mali is a good example. There are a number of other conflicts in Africa at the present moment—indeed, there have been a number of other requests for a couple of British transport aircraft or a training team—of the sort that we are likely to be find ourselves in in the coming years where the question of where the threshold comes is very difficult to operate. That is part of the argument that we are going through within government at the moment and about which we are having a dialogue with Parliament.

My response is that I find myself—rather to my surprise—becoming one of the Government’s supposed experts on this area, and we need to have a continuing dialogue with Parliament about the numbers of deployments that we have. I remind the House—as I said in evidence to the Commons committee—that there are now 16 different operations overseas under European common security and defence policy. The British have contingents in 14 of these. I am sure all noble Lords taking part in this debate could name all of them. In most cases, these are very small numbers of people; some of them are policemen, not military. In all of them, we are not entirely sure how secure they are or how long these deployments will last. In places like Somalia and South Sudan, or in Darfur, where we are often working with UN, AU or other forces, the question of how far we are formally committed is itself not entirely clear. That is part of the uncertain world in which we live.

[Baroness Falkner of Margravine]

I do not want to make heavy weather of this, particularly not at this late hour. I do not think, however, that anyone in this House first of all talked of legally enshrining in statute a method of dealing with this. The difference between us is about a draft resolution or the convention. The conflicts that my noble friend has described are of course in a wide grey area, but several of them are not covered by the law of armed conflict, hence the Labour Party’s draft resolution would not need to come into force in that regard.

[Lord Wallace of Saltaire]

The question of where the threshold should lie and what sort of triggers one has on this is very much part of what we need to discuss further.

I will try to answer some of the questions raised by noble Lords. Several noble Lords asked when the next revision of the Cabinet Manual will be. I think that I have to say, “In due course”. The latest revision came early in this Parliament under a new Government. I think it is likely that the next Government will find it convenient to take in a further revision but I hesitate to commit that Government, whoever they may be.

Much of what we are talking about is whether you are taking a decision—as on Syria, for example—where it is clear that you are making a major commitment. It would clearly have been a major event to send either cruise missiles or planes over Syria. We were over the threshold and therefore it was entirely proper for Parliament to consider it and take the decision.

There are a number of other areas where it is not entirely clear where the threshold is. The noble and gallant Lord, Lord Guthrie, rightly pointed out that the Gulf conflict involved a very major commitment of forces. However, we found ourselves carrying on afterwards in Kurdistan, with a number of much more shaded decisions to take. I think I recall being told that there was a point during that deployment when the colonel in charge of the Royal Marine commando issued orders to his companies, and the Dutch major who was part of the commando said, “If you ask my company to do that, I will need to refer back to The Hague”. We are all struggling with evolving situations in which one has to say, again, that the legality and legitimacy are also in play.

The noble Lord, Lord Maclennan, talked about legality and the need to make sure that we are in accordance with international law. Similarly again, as Professor Sands would accept, it is not entirely clear what international law requires. Do we have to have a resolution of the UN Security Council, with all five permanent members authorising the action? The western powers intervened in Kosovo with some real sense of legitimacy, in spite of the resistance of some permanent members of the Security Council. Do we have to be sure that we can justify what we did in terms of the concept of just war? In the aftermath of the Iraq war, I remember taking part in a rather large Anglo-American conference, jointly organised by the Anglican Church and the Roman Catholic Church, on the concept of just war and coming away thinking that we had failed to agree on what that concept really meant in the modern world. We have the doctrine of responsibility to protect, which is very attractive but also not entirely easy to pin down on the ground.

A number of noble Lords spoke about the importance of public confidence and of troops knowing, once deployed, that Parliament has given formal approval. In an extended conflict, it is important to make sure that Parliament continues to have confidence in the mission. Going to war nowadays, or committing troops to conflict, is not simply a decision but a process. It therefore requires a continuing dialogue between the Government and Parliament and, of course, between the Government and the wider public.

I would say to the noble Lord, Lord Hennessy, that conventions are not entirely fragile. Conventions are developed and are difficult for a Government to break. Commons resolutions have more solidity but they can also be bent—they have sinews but they do seem to move up and down. My own sense of all this dialogue is that we need to continue to reflect and argue.

Within a few weeks we will have the report of the Commons committee. The Government will have to respond to that committee and that will take us further along the road to deciding how far we can strengthen the existing convention, how far it should be formalised in a resolution—I recognise that there are those in both Houses who believe that the time has come for a formal resolution—and how far the convention should be written into the next edition of the Cabinet Manual. Rightly, this issue will continue to attract the attention of both Houses of Parliament. Mention has been made of the Chilcot inquiry, which we all hope will emerge soon, and that will feed into this debate.

I end by thanking the committee for this report. It has aroused further debate within the Government. I have met officials in recent weeks to discuss it further. We will continue to reflect on this. The Government’s response to the Commons committee will be the next stage in that. Part of that reflection will be whether we are satisfied that this convention has now become strong enough or whether we should yield to the demands in both Houses that what we now need is a resolution. If so, we need to reflect on how that resolution should be formed and what sort of threshold one might need to write into such a resolution, as well as the continuing dialogue that Parliament and the Government need to have about the commitment of armed forces. In future these are likely to be in relatively small elements, which are multinational, in which the British may not be a major element, in which we are in support of the troops of other nations, and in which we are dealing with multiple conflict situations in weak states as often as we are dealing with a conflict against a state—after all, the Gulf conflict was a conflict against a state and therefore relatively clear—and we will come back to Parliament with our conclusions when they are ready.

[Lord Kennedy of Southwark]

My Lords, before the noble Lord sits down, I asked him two specific questions which perhaps he could clarify. I am very happy if he wants to reflect on these and come back to the House at a later date or write to Members and place a copy in the Library. I asked him about writing to the committee in 12 months’ time with regard to the progress of the recommendations. Secondly, I asked him what the Government are going to do about ensuring that the public more fully understand the conventions.

[Lord Wallace of Saltaire]

My Lords, I hoped that I had answered the question about the evolution of the conventions and the future of the Cabinet Manual. Before 12 months have elapsed, the Government will be responding to the report of the Commons committee, which will take us to the next stage.

Of course we wish to ensure that the conventions are understood by the public. I am not sure that the mass public all want to understand the exact nature of parliamentary conventions but we will do our best. Perhaps the Government should consider sending the noble Lord, Lord Hennessy, on a tour of the country to give a number of public lectures explaining the nature of this particular convention.

Iran

Lord Wallace of Saltaire Excerpts

Monday 25th November 2013 Lords Chamber

[Lord Wallace of Saltaire (LD)]

My Lords, with the leave of the House, I will repeat a Statement which my right honourable friend the Foreign Secretary has made to the Commons.

“Two weeks ago, I reported to the House on the Iranian nuclear negotiations in Geneva between 8 and 10 November. I explained that our aim was to produce an interim first-step agreement with Iran that could then create the confidence and time to negotiate a comprehensive and final settlement addressing all concerns about its nuclear programme. We have always been clear that because Iran’s programme is so extensive, and because crucial aspects of it have been concealed in the past, any agreement would have to be detailed and give assurance to the whole world that the threat of nuclear proliferation in Iran would be properly addressed. I said that we believed that such a deal was on the table and that we would do our utmost to bridge the narrow gaps between the parties and conclude a strong agreement.

On Wednesday last week, the E3+3 and Iranian negotiators resumed their work in Geneva, and on Saturday morning I and the other E3+3 Foreign Ministers joined the talks. At 4 am yesterday we concluded the negotiations successfully, agreeing a thorough and detailed first-stage agreement with Iran, which is a significant step towards enhancing the security of the Middle East and preventing nuclear proliferation worldwide. In this Statement I will cover the extensive commitments that Iran has made, the sanctions relief that it has been offered in return and the steps we will now take to implement and build on what was agreed.

First, we have agreed a joint plan of action with Iran, with the end goal of a comprehensive settlement that ensures its nuclear programme will be for exclusively peaceful purposes. The agreement has a duration of six months, renewable by mutual consent, and it sets out actions to be taken by both sides as a first step, as well as the elements to be negotiated in a final comprehensive settlement. I have placed a copy of the agreement in the Library of the House, but I wish now to highlight its most important aspects.

Iran has made a number of very significant commitments. Over the next six months, Iran will cease enriching uranium above 5%, the level beyond which it becomes much easier to produce weapons-grade uranium. Furthermore, it has undertaken to eradicate its stockpile of the most concerning form of uranium enriched above 5%, by diluting half of it to a level of less than 5% and converting the other half to oxide. Iran will not install further centrifuges in its nuclear facilities or start operating installed centrifuges that have not yet been switched on. It will replace existing centrifuges only with centrifuges of the same type, and produce centrifuges only to replace damaged existing machines on a like-for-like basis. In other words, Iran will not install or bring into operation advanced centrifuges that could enable it to produce a dangerous level of enriched uranium more quickly. Iran will cap its stockpile of up to 5% enriched uranium in the highest risk UF6 form by converting any newly enriched uranium into oxide. It will not set up any new locations for enrichment or establish a reprocessing or reconversion facility.

Iran has agreed to enhanced monitoring of its nuclear programme going beyond existing IAEA inspections in Iran, including access to centrifuge assembly workshops and to uranium mines and mills. Iran will also provide the IAEA with additional information, including about its plans for nuclear facilities. At the heavy water research reactor at Arak, which offers Iran a potential route to a nuclear weapon through the production of plutonium rather than uranium, Iran will not commission the reactor, or transfer fuel or heavy water to the reactor site, or test additional fuel, or produce more fuel for the reactor, or install any remaining components.

This agreement means that the elements of Iran’s nuclear programme that are thought to present the greatest risk cannot make progress during the six-month period of the interim agreement. In other words, if Iran implements the deal in good faith, as it has undertaken to do, it cannot use these routes to move closer to obtaining a nuclear weapons capability. Moreover, some of the most dangerous elements of Iran’s programme are not only frozen but actually rolled back; for instance, the agreement involves the eradication of around 200 kilograms of 20% enriched uranium in UF6 form that Iran has been building up and stockpiling for several years.

Secondly, in return for these commitments Iran will receive proportionate, limited sanctions relief from the United States and the European Union. For its part, the United States will pause efforts to reduce crude oil sales to Iran’s oil customers, repatriate to Iran some of its oil revenue held abroad, suspend sanctions on the Iranian auto industry, allow the licensing of safety-related repairs and inspections for certain Iranian airlines, and establish a financial channel to facilitate humanitarian and legitimate trade, including for payments to international organisations and for Iranians studying abroad.

It is proposed that the EU and US together will suspend sanctions on oil-related insurance and transport costs, which will allow the provision of such services to third states for the import of Iranian oil. We will also suspend the prohibition of the import, purchase or transport of Iranian petrochemical products, and suspend sanctions on Iranian imports of gold and precious metals. But core sanctions on Iranian oil and gas will remain in place. It is intended that the EU will also increase by an agreed amount the authorisation thresholds for financial transactions for humanitarian and non-sanctioned trade with Iran. The Council of Ministers of the European Union will be asked to adopt legislation necessary to amend these sanctions, and the new provisions would then apply to all EU member states.

The total value of the sanctions relief is estimated at $7 billion over the six-month period. There will be no new nuclear-related sanctions adopted by the UN, EU and US during this six-month period. However, the bulk of international sanctions on Iran will remain in place. This includes the EU and US oil embargo which restricts globally oil purchases from Iran, and sanctions on nuclear, military or ballistic missile-related goods and technology. It includes all frozen revenue and foreign exchange reserves held in accounts outside Iran and sanctions on many Iranian banks, such as the Central Bank of Iran, which means that all Iranian assets in the US and EU remain frozen apart from the limited repatriation of revenue under this agreement. Iranian leaders and key individuals and entities will still have their assets in the EU and US frozen and be banned from travelling to the EU and US, and tough financial measures, including a ban from using financial messaging services and transactions with European and US banks, also remain in place. These sanctions will not be lifted until a comprehensive settlement is reached, and we will enforce them robustly. This ensures that Iran still has a powerful incentive to continue to negotiate to reach a comprehensive settlement—which is the third aspect of the agreement on which I wish to update the House today.

The agreement sets out the elements of a comprehensive solution which we would aim to conclude within one year. These elements include Iran’s rights and obligations under the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty and IAEA safeguards; the full resolution of concerns related to the heavy water research reactor at Arak; agreed transparency and monitoring including the additional protocol; and co-operation on Iran’s civilian nuclear programme. In return for full confidence on the part of the international community that Iran’s programme is solely peaceful, the plan of action envisages a mutually defined enrichment programme with agreed parameters and limits, but only as part of a comprehensive agreement where nothing is agreed until everything is agreed. This comprehensive solution, if and when agreed, would lead to the lifting of all UN Security Council sanctions as well as multilateral and national sanctions related to Iran’s nuclear programme.

Reaching this interim agreement was a difficult and painstaking process, and there is a huge amount of work to be done to implement it. Implementation will begin following technical discussions with Iran and the IAEA and EU preparations to suspend the relevant sanctions, which we hope will all be concluded by the end of January 2014. A joint commission of the E3+3 and Iran will be established to monitor the implementation of these first-step measures, and it will work with the IAEA to resolve outstanding issues of concern.

However, the fact that we have achieved for the first time in nearly a decade an agreement that halts and rolls back Iran’s nuclear programme should give us heart that this work can be done and that a comprehensive agreement can be attained. On an issue of such complexity, and given the fact that to make any diplomatic agreement worth while to both sides has to involve compromises, such an agreement is bound to have its critics and opponents. But we are right to test to the full Iran’s readiness to act in good faith to work with the rest of the international community and to enter into international agreements. If it does not abide by its commitments, it will bear a heavy responsibility, but if we did not take the opportunity to attempt such an agreement, then we ourselves would have been guilty of a grave error. It is true that if we did not have this agreement, the pressure of sanctions on Iran would not be alleviated at all. But it is also true that there would be no restraint on advances to its programme, no check on its enrichment activity and stockpiles, no block on its addition of centrifuges, no barrier to prevent it bringing into operation its heavy water research reactor at Arak and no limitation on the many actions which could take it closer to a nuclear weapons capability.

The bringing together of this agreement with all five permanent members of the United Nations Security Council united behind it in itself sends a powerful signal. While it is only a beginning, there is no doubt that this is an important, necessary and completely justified step which, through its restrictions on Iran’s nuclear programme, gives us the time to negotiate a comprehensive settlement. I pay tribute to the noble Baroness, Lady Ashton, to my Foreign Ministerial colleagues and to our Foreign Office staff, who have played an indispensable role. We will apply the same rigour and determination we have shown in these negotiations to the implementation of the agreement and to the search for a comprehensive settlement. At the same time we will continue to be open to improvements in our bilateral relationship on a step-by-step and reciprocal basis, and our new chargé d’affaires will visit Iran shortly. This agreement has shown that the combination of pressure expressed through sanctions coupled with a readiness to negotiate is the right policy.

For a long time that has been the united approach of this country, from the efforts of the right honourable Member for Blackburn to pursue negotiations a decade ago to the cross-party support in this House for the wide-ranging sanctions we have adopted in recent years. We have been steadfast in pursuing this twin-track policy and seeking a peaceful solution. This agreement is true to that approach and the sheer persistence of the United Kingdom and our allies. This will remain our policy over the coming months as we build on and implement the first step on the long journey to making the Middle East and the whole world safer from nuclear proliferation”.

My Lords, that concludes the Statement.

--- Later in debate ---

[Lord Wallace of Saltaire]

My Lords, I thank the noble Lord very warmly for his very constructive and bipartisan comments. I think it is extremely important that this is seen as something to which the entire political community within Britain is committed, that we take it forward together and that we make sure that we are all well informed as we go forward together on the dangers, but also the possibilities.

I am also grateful to the noble Lord for his compliments to the Foreign Office team and the Foreign Secretary himself. There have been occasions in the past few months when I have felt like saying to the Foreign Secretary, when I meet him, “Is this a short visit to Britain or are you here for two days?”. As we all know, he has been travelling a great deal in pursuing this issue. The noble Lord is also absolutely right to give strong compliments to the American Secretary of State and the State Department team—and, of course, the other European diplomats, not least at all our colleague, the noble Baroness, Lady Ashton, who have also worked flat out on all this.

I stress that this is only an interim agreement for six months. There is a lot more still to be done. On the question of how often inspectors will be allowed to visit, the agreement as signed provides some details on enhanced monitoring including,

“Daily IAEA inspector access when inspectors are not present for the purpose of Design Information Verification”,

et cetera, with relevance to Fordo and Natanz. However, the details on the exact degree of access are part of what needs to be sorted out between now and January, when we hope the six-month clock will start ticking.

As the noble Lord will know, there is not yet agreement between the two sides on the right to enrich. We are clear that every signatory of the non-proliferation treaty has the right to develop nuclear power for peaceful nuclear purposes, but we have not yet reached a full agreement with Iran on how that fits in with the full and detailed IAEA obligations.

Lastly, the noble Lord talked about the potential overlap with the Syrian conflict and the Geneva II talks. Let me stress that this is a negotiation with Iran about the nuclear issue; it does not have a direct overlap into other issues. Of course we may hope, however, that if we are successful in achieving a comprehensive settlement, it will have wider impacts on relations across the Middle East as a whole.

[Lord Triesman]

My Lords, before the noble Lord sits down, I understand about the daily inspections in two sites, but I was very particular in asking what the inspection regime for Arak will be.

--- Later in debate ---

[Lord Wallace of Saltaire]

My Lords, I see here that the agreement also refers to a,

“Submission of an updated … design information questionnaire … for the reactor at Arak”.

However, the exact details of the inspection regime on an interim basis are part of the detail that has to be negotiated and agreed between the parties between now and when the interim agreement comes into implementation in, we hope, late January.

[Earl Attlee (Con)]

My Lords, I remind the House of the benefit of short questions for my noble friend the Minister in order that all noble Lords who wish to contribute may have a decent chance of doing so.

[Lord Lloyd of Berwick (CB)]

My Lords, perhaps I might briefly ask the noble Lord to say a bit more, if he can, about the part played by our colleague, the noble Baroness, Lady Ashton, in brokering this very welcome agreement.

[Lord Wallace of Saltaire]

My Lords, my understanding is that under a UN Security Council resolution, the noble Baroness was designated as the co-ordinator for these negotiations. This has been an EU exercise with the three largest Governments within the European Union, in effect, representing the EU. The noble Baroness has to some extent represented the interests of the other 25 member states and I know that she has put an enormous amount of effort into this as well.

[Baroness Williams of Crosby (LD)]

My Lords, I add my thanks to the Minister for repeating the Statement and, if I may say so, for his own contribution to the work of the Foreign Office team, for the outstanding work of the Foreign Secretary and Mr Kerry and, not least, for the really great steps taken—one has to add this—by the Iranian Foreign Secretary in trying to bring about an agreement, with what was perhaps the significant support of the supreme ruler in Iran. It is the outbreak of common-sense discussion, real wisdom and a real desire to avoid war which has driven this remarkable agreement. I say to my noble friend that this is a remarkable moment in history. Of course, it is not the end but the beginning of a crucial set of steps towards bringing Iran back into the comity of nations and enabling us to produce a new structure that will give both the IAEA and the protection from nuclear proliferation an extremely important new impetus.

Perhaps I may say one other word, which is that I hope that the naysayers of this world—those who are likely to oppose this agreement—will recognise that the alternatives are terrible ones. They are in either military action or going back to absolute chaos in the Middle East. At a time when many of us are grieving over the terrible cost of the invasion of Iraq and, for that matter, the long war in Afghanistan, this is a moment when we should recognise the achievement of diplomacy and sensible discussion, as distinct from attempts to threaten other countries.

I have two questions. First, I do not in any way disagree with the questions asked so powerfully by the noble Lord, Lord Triesman, but it is crucial to recognise as well that we need to build on the elements coming out of this agreement that would so massively strengthen the battle against proliferation of nuclear weapons. I ask my noble friend whether the addition of the concept of enhanced monitoring that has come out of this agreement is one that, in his own view, could be extended more readily throughout the whole nuclear proliferation issue, along with the remarkable steps taken by the IAEA towards a much more powerful regime, including in effect the additional protocol, which up till now Iran has not been willing to sign.

My second question is whether the creation of the so-called committee of the E3 plus 3 with Iran might enable us to begin to build the first of new relationships with this isolated but intensely important country, which will enable it to make a serious contribution to the Syrian civil war. In that context, there are cultural, religious and economic links that could be made with Iran that would help to bring it in from the cold and build on the hopeful measures towards a more open and democratic Iran, as we have seen in the past few months.

[Lord Wallace of Saltaire]

I thank the noble Baroness for her compliments to the Foreign Secretary and others. We hope that this will prove to have been a remarkable moment in history, but we do not yet know; the test will be in the negotiations that take place over the next year. There is no doubt that sanctions and the extent to which they were biting in Iran have played a major part in shifting opinions in the Iranian regime in all its complexity, and certainly among the Iranian public.

In response to the noble Baroness’s questions, of course we would like to see a tougher, enhanced IAEA regime that spreads to others. I suspect that the noble Baroness knows a great deal more about this than I do, since I know that she has been involved in a lot of international discussions on this matter. That is one of the things that could grow out of these negotiations. The joint commission will, of course, be concerned with implementing the agreement. The first visit of the chargé already appointed is likely to take place in the next few weeks, and we may hope that, from that, other relationships may grow—but that will be something that we all have to work for as we work through these still complex and delicate negotiations.

[Lord Hannay of Chiswick (CB)]

I add my congratulations to the Government on the conclusion of this interim agreement and to the noble Baroness, Lady Ashton. I hope that the Minister will find some way of conveying to her the views that have been warmly expressed in this House this afternoon. She has put in a huge effort.

This is the first step, as the Minister says, away from this conflict and others in the Middle East. Does he agree that, while it is clearly right that Israel’s concerns over Iran’s nuclear program should be treated seriously, attempts by the Prime Minister of Israel to prevent or perhaps now to wreck this agreement would be counterproductive and, in fact, against Israel’s long-term interests? Does he also agree that Saudi Arabia and our other friends in the Gulf ought to be brought to understand that a non-nuclear weapon state Iran could and should be a genuine regional player in the Gulf region? Finally, does he agree that the British Government should urge those points and use their influence in Washington with those who are most critical of the agreement to explain why the British Government believe that this is the right way forward?

[Lord Wallace of Saltaire]

My Lords, we are all conscious of nervousness in a number of other states in the Middle East about this agreement. We are persuaded that this enhances the security of Israel. The alternative, which might have led to a military attack on Iran, would have jeopardised a whole range of issues about the long-term security of the Middle East. We have said that to our Israeli friends. The Prime Minister spoke to Mr Netanyahu in the middle of the previous round of negotiations on 9 November and will no doubt be talking to him again. We have been saying the same to our friends in Saudi Arabia and the various Gulf states. We have many active diplomats and friends in Washington who will be saying the same to the American Congress; but the noble Lord knows that American politics are even more complex than those of most other states.

[Lord Reid of Cardowan (Lab)]

My Lords, I add my congratulations to everyone involved and echo the sentiments that have been expressed about the role played by my noble friend Lady Ashton. She has been subjected to what I consider to be much unwarranted criticism despite the fact that she has, unheralded and unsung, had some singular successes, not least in Kosovo. This is an occasion on which the feelings of this House should be sent to our colleague.

I have two questions. First, while we approach this with a degree of elation—it is only a step, but it is a significant first step—we can nevertheless understand why such an apparently sudden turn of events should have perhaps caused some confusion and worry among some of our traditional allies such as Israel and Saudi Arabia. What steps are being taken to reassure and persuade them, if necessary, that the normalisation of relationships with Iran is in everyone’s interest, not least that of the region itself?

Secondly, while we are right to temper our feelings of elation with a degree of caution, will the Minister bear in mind that each step that is taken, however singular it might be, opens up other opportunities? I am persuaded that some of the decisions to proceed as we did on Syria, rather than taking the alternative route, opened—as some in this House including the noble Baroness, Lady Williams, predicted—a gateway to further compromise and discussion with Iran. Similarly, although there is a long way to go on this, I urge the Minister to seek to use this gateway for further exploration of work in the area, including in Syria, involving Iran as the great nation it has been historically. It will surely return to the realms of the United Nations and international influence if it proceeds along the path it is taking at present.

[Lord Wallace of Saltaire]

My Lords, I will be happy to convey the thoughts of this House to the noble Baroness, Lady Ashton; I may be able to do so to her husband in the next few days. While compliments are going around, I remark that I have been immensely impressed, as a Liberal Democrat, in working with William Hague over the past three years. He works exceptionally hard and has travelled extensively on this. His relationship with his Russian counterpart has been quite a significant factor in building trust and co-operation across the P5. It is also worth marking that this is a triumph of European co-operation: the British working with our German and French counterparts. Perhaps even the Daily Mail might like to note that.

On the wider region, with this deeply unstable region, with jihadists of different hues threatening even more brutal civil conflict spilling over different borders, anything which perhaps begins to reverse that potential spiral downhill is immensely worth while. We very much hope that this will help to turn that corner. We are also of course conscious that Iran is a great country with a long history, and that it has a complicated history with the United Kingdom which it has not forgotten quite as easily as we have. That is one of the many things which we need to overcome.

[Lord Deben (Con)]

Will my noble friend continue to make the point that this is a real contribution by the European Union and by the noble Baroness, Lady Ashton? There has been a good deal of misstatement by the British press over these arrangements. This shows just what Europe can do, is doing and ought to do at a time when people sometimes try to suggest otherwise. Will the Minister say to the nay-sayers that to refuse to make this step would mean that there would be no steps? You have to make a first step. If you always say, “Well, it might go wrong”, nothing will ever go right. To hear some people, they are condemning us to a situation in which no one will ever try to do anything. That has to be the message to Mr Netanyahu and to the Saudis—that if they maintain their position, they are saying to the rest of the world that this will be an area of conflict for ever. That is not something that any of us should accept.

[Lord Wallace of Saltaire]

I thank the noble Lord for his comments and agree entirely with them. We recognise that diplomats spend an awful lot of their time working on negotiations that do not lead anywhere and trying to support compromises that are attacked on all sides. This is one happy example—we hope—of when diplomacy will have succeeded.

[Lord Turnberg (Lab)]

My Lords, I, too, add my congratulations to all who have been involved in this development. I will ask two short questions. First, is there a mismatch between the time at which sanctions may be partially released on the one hand and the nuclear inspections on the other? Is there a problem with starting this programme only in January, which would give time for the Iranians perhaps to do more mischief in the interim period? On the question of the percentage at which enrichment is to be allowed, I have heard figures of 5% and 20%. Can the noble Lord clarify which of these is correct?

[Lord Wallace of Saltaire]

My Lords, the timing of sanctions release is very carefully calibrated. The sanctions that will be lifted are extremely limited—the majority of them will remain in place. Incidentally, I asked the briefing team how far humanitarian sanctions would include some relief of the controls on medicines and medical supplies for Iran. I know that that is one of the things that has hit Iran particularly hard. I, personally, welcome the provision of repairs and spare parts for Iranian airlines, because it has become increasingly unsafe to fly within Iran, as the noble Lord will know. On the gap between now and January, we cannot put that immediately into operation. However, the sanctions relief does not go into immediate operation either. We need to work through the details. On 5% and 20%, the latter is the point at which it becomes dangerous and relatively easy to carry through the further enrichment to weapons-grade uranium. Therefore the Iranians have agreed to dilute half of their current, rather large stockpile of 20% uranium back down to 5%, which is the point at which it is useful for civil nuclear power but not for very much else, and to convert the other half into uranium oxide, which also makes it useful for civil nuclear power but not for weapons.

[Lord Tugendhat (Con)]

My Lords, I associate myself very strongly with the words of my noble friend Lord Deben about the contribution made by the European Union and by the noble Baroness, Lady Ashton. I also associate myself with the words of the noble Baroness, Lady Williams, who praised the Iranian negotiators. It is often forgotten, when one looks at the position of Iran on these matters, that it is one of the countries that have been on the receiving end of weapons of mass destruction, namely from Iraq. When a country has been on the receiving end of such weapons, that makes it very sensitive to its own ability to protect itself against all eventualities. When one looks at the Iranian nuclear programme, it is important to bear that in mind. Therefore, the concessions that the Iranians have made and the apparent good will with which they have entered into these negotiations must have required a very considerable effort on their part. We should certainly pay tribute to them and we hope very much that they, with the West, will be able to bring this to a conclusion.

[Lord Wallace of Saltaire]

My Lords, I thank the noble Lord for his comments. We have negotiated this agreement with the Government of Iran. As all noble Lords will know, Iran is an extremely complex country with an extremely complex political system. We hope that the Government of Iran will make this stick. Nevertheless, we know that there are elements within the political system of Iran who may not be quite as happy with it as the Government are. That is part of what we will test out in the coming months.

[Baroness Symons of Vernham Dean (Lab)]

My Lords, I associate myself with all the congratulations that have been offered to those who we can name because of their pre-eminent role in what has happened but also to those many diplomats whose names we do not know. One of the facilities that has caused most concern is the underground nuclear facility where uranium enrichment has not been carried out at a nuclear level but has certainly been produced in quantities that have given great cause for concern. Will the noble Lord assure the House that the underground facilities will be inspected by the IAEA, as my noble friend Lord Triesman asked?

In asking my next question, I declare an unremunerated interest as the chairman of the British side of the Saudi-British Business Council. I returned from Saudi Arabia early this morning. A considerable job will obviously have to be done to convince many of our friends in the Gulf states of the wisdom of the agreement that has been made. Will the Minister tell the House a little more about what is intended to be done now—not what has been done in the past because that has still left a lot of questions in the minds of colleagues, particularly in Saudi Arabia—to give assurance to the Gulf states about the agreement that has been reached?

[Lord Wallace of Saltaire]

My Lords, a great many officials have worked long hours and have spent a long time on planes going back and forth. It so happens that the State Department official I know best has led the State Department delegation at official level. According to everything I have heard, she has done extremely well. However, there is still a great deal of work to be done. On the underground facilities at Fordo, the exact details of the inspection regime remain to be negotiated and agreed, and then enforced, between now and the end of January. However, it is clear that we expect to have access to all these facilities. Of course, there are Saudi and Gulf state concerns, as there are concerns in Israel, and we are in active dialogue with the Saudis and others about them. It would be disastrous for the Middle East if this were to descend into a sectarian Sunni/Shia conflict. Let us hope that one of the outcomes of the agreement will be to reverse what some of us feared might be taking us in that direction.