European Parliamentary Elections (Amendment) Regulations 2013

Lord Wallace of Saltaire Excerpts

Tuesday 22nd October 2013 Lords Chamber

Moved by

[Lord Wallace of Saltaire]

That the draft regulations laid before the House on 9 July be approved.

Relevant Document: 8th Report from the Joint Committee on Statutory Instruments, considered in Grand Committee on 15 October.

Motion agreed.

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

Lord Wallace of Saltaire Excerpts

Tuesday 22nd October 2013 Lords Chamber

[Lord Wallace of Saltaire (LD)]

My Lords, this has been a vigorous debate with a wide range of opinions forcefully expressed around the House. First, the Government are listening and consulting, and we will continue to do so. We will take this carefully through Committee, and we are concerned to make sure that the Bill as it emerges from this House reassures the very evident concerns, particularly from the charity sector. The noble Lord, Lord Judd, rightly said that the charity sector perceives this as an attack. That is, by and large, a mistaken perception. However, of course we have to reassure people and make sure, as we take this Bill through the various stages, that we have a Bill that we are all happy with as it emerges from this House.

Let me take the three parts in order. First, on the lobbying issue, as a number of noble Lords said, lobbying is a legitimate activity. Indeed, it is central to any thriving democracy and is an almost universal activity. Almost every working day Parliament is being lobbied. Those who had offices on the West Front particularly enjoyed the London Gay Men’s Chorus lobbying us several nights in a row. We wished that they would come back more often. It was one of the most enjoyable bits of lobbying that we have had so far.

Part 1 is intended to focus on professional lobbyists, the skilled and the well paid, those who provide their services for hire. The noble Baroness, Lady Smith, talked about lobbying companies which do not even declare their clients. That is precisely what Part 1 addresses to make sure that lobbying companies declare their clients. That is where we started out in our consultation in 2010-11. I regret to say that the various respondents to that consultation came back with a whole range of discordant and dissentious responses. The Government have decided to take the Australian approach to a lobbying register, which is to have a register of professional and consultant lobbyists, not a universal register.

[Baroness Hayter of Kentish Town]

Will the Minister accept that if a Minister meets lobbyists of that sort, although there may well be a list on a website with their 40 clients, it will not tell anybody which client that Minister was meeting? All it will say is that those are their 40 clients. Anyone will still be in the dark about which client had set up that meeting with the Minister.

[Lord Wallace of Saltaire]

I take the point that the noble Baroness makes. She has said to me off the Floor of the House that this ought to be reinforced by making sure that in the notes of the meeting there is a reference to the subject of the meeting so that those in the press and outside who want to understand what happened are informed which of the clients the meeting was about. This is therefore a step towards transparency. It does not claim to provide complete transparency on all contacts between outside proponents of particular policies and Ministers or officials. If we were to do that, we would find ourselves with a huge amount of information of the sort that the NSA loves to collect for the United States, but might not be beneficial to British politics. If we were to include all lobbyists, as some of the answers to the consultation wished, and included all charity lobbyists, I think that the answer from the charities sector would also be very negative. However, charities do have lobbyists. For example, Oxfam has people who actively lobby the public and the Government. Therefore, we have to be a little careful over how universal one needs to be. That is the importance of starting—perhaps others will want to go further—with a register of consultant lobbyists and of their major contact with the Government.

The noble Lord, Lord Norton, suggested that we should start at the other end by asking all officials and Ministers to register whom they have met. I see no reason why, in a sense, as transparency develops, the two should not come together. I have just filled in my quarterly return of whom I have met, including a number of people who could be described as lobbyists. Indeed, Saferworld was one of those that I reported on for obvious reasons: as I represent the Foreign Office, I talk to Saferworld and other such charities. That is part of what we already do.

The question of how far down the list one should go and whether it should include special advisers has also been raised. That clearly is a question to which we will return in Committee, and I look forward to that debate. However, I am conscious that the major concerns are on Part 2, to which I now turn.

I assure the noble Lord, Lord Phillips, that a Keeling schedule will be available well before Committee for everyone who wishes to look at it. I say with due confidence that, since he first asked me that question, I have discovered what a Keeling schedule is.

[Lord Rooker]

With respect, that is a worry, because that is the kind of thing that the Minister should have been advised about before the Bill was introduced. For the Minister to say now—and I am not being personal about this—that he did not know what a Keeling schedule was when we have a major constitutional Bill, and it is the norm to do it this way and has been for a long time, shows a failure of those who have been advising Ministers.

[Lord Wallace of Saltaire]

It shows my ignorance more than anything. The Bill team has a Keeling schedule, and it will be distributed. Of course, the Bill team has a Keeling schedule—it is part of what Bill teams have to do in preparing the Bill. Since this is a rather complicated amendment of PPERA, that is what we are into.

I stress, as has been stressed by a number of noble Lords, that this is an amendment to PPERA. It is about election law, not about charities law; charities are not the main target and not those mainly affected by it. The most recent Electoral Commission report on this said:

“The Commission believes that, where significant non-party campaigning takes place, this should be transparent and properly regulated ... We think these controls on campaigning that is not explicitly ‘party political’ are a necessary part of the regime. Without them, it would be easy to evade the rules by framing political campaigning in terms of policies. For similar reasons, we do not think the rules should exclude particular types of organisations, such as charities or voluntary bodies, as this would create opportunities for political campaigners to evade the rules and would reduce transparency. However, the necessarily wide scope of the definition of controlled spending makes it particularly important to consider the overall impact on campaigners of Part 2 of the Bill, including the registration thresholds and spending limits”.

That is what we will focus on in Committee—but it is correct that we should include this in the scope of the Bill.

I was quite surprised—

[Baroness Royall of Blaisdon]

As the Minister has just said, rightly, that it is important to look at the effect on charities and campaigning organisations affected by the Bill, why did the Government not consult those bodies before bringing the Bill forward? The Minister said just now that now that they had had their Second Reading they were going to consult. Why did not the Government consult beforehand?

[Lord Wallace of Saltaire]

I am conscious of a number of meetings with ACEVO, the NCVO and a number of other organisations over the past few months—and we are continuing to consult them. So we are not just about to start; we have been consulting.

I was quite surprised that no one had looked at the list of registered third parties for controlled expenditure for the 2010 general election, which seems to be a relevant part of the background. There are 30 of them on the list that I have here; six of them are in the field of animal welfare, which is hardly surprising—and the noble Baroness, Lady Mallalieu, is nodding at me as I say this. There are two major unions. Among others, there is an interesting body called the Young Britons’ Foundation. I Googled several of these bodies just to discover them, and perhaps I can read something for those noble Lords who think that American campaigning has not yet reached Britain. It says that the foundation,

“was launched in July 2003 at a conference of the Young America’s Foundation in Washington, D.C., and it has said that it aims to ‘import American political techniques into the UK’”.

On the most recent knowledge that I have, its advisory board included,

“representatives of the Heritage Foundation … US Competitive Enterprise Institute and American Conservative Union”,

and a number of other, similar bodies.

[Lord Greaves]

I was very confused by the quote that my noble friend read from the Electoral Commission, which refers to “political campaigning”. The existing PPERA and the proposed wording as amended in the House of Commons on Report in this Bill do not refer to political campaigning at all. Clause 26(2)(b) now says that,

“the expenditure can reasonably be regarded as intended to promote or procure electoral success at any relevant election for … one or more particular registered parties … one or more registered parties”,

and so on. This is about electoral campaigning. It seems to me that the dividing line is between general political campaigning on the one hand and electoral campaigning seeking the success or non-success of a particular party or candidate on the other. What my noble friend has just read out seems to muddy the waters. This will be an absolutely crucial discussion in Committee.

[Lord Wallace of Saltaire]

My Lords, I was about to come to precisely that distinction because it seems to me to be the nub of what we will have to discuss when we deal with Part 2. There is a line to be drawn between the promotion of policies and the promotion of the success or defeat of particular parties or candidates. Policing the line between informing and educating the public during a campaign, promoting particular policies during a campaign and, on the other side of the line, supporting or opposing particular candidates or parties during a campaign, is the point on which we need to focus during Committee and Report. I am concerned that this is not an easy line to define. We want to make sure that there is as small a grey area as possible. At the all-Peers meeting, the noble Lord, Lord Dubs, quoted a leaflet which had been put round his constituency the day before he lost an election which had a very large headline saying, “We are not telling you who to vote for”, and then a lot of small print which did. That is the sort of thing that we will have to look at in detail.

This measure is not aimed primarily at charities. Indeed, of the 30 organisations on the list, three are the campaigning non-charitable associated bodies of charities, but none is a charity. Charities should not be caught by this measure. After all, charities law limits how far charities can become involved in partisan campaigning. Charities should be involved in political campaigning. I recommend that noble Lords look at the list to see how far we can come to an agreement on the borderline. The noble and right reverend Lord, Lord Harries, talked precisely about the borderline between current activities and controlled activities, and the chilling effect of having an uncertain definition of that. However, that is where we are. From the discussions I have had with people over the past few weeks, I have the slight impression that a large number of charities had not actually read the Political Parties, Elections and Referendums Act until this Bill was produced. Having looked at the language of that Act, a number of charities are telling us that they are not happy with that language as it stands. We have entered a discussion that we should perhaps have had earlier. The Government started on the assumption that the language of PPERA was fine because we had—

[Lord Lea of Crondall]

My Lords—

[Lord Wallace of Saltaire]

May I just finish my point? We had been through two elections with that language and charities do not appear to have found it difficult. If charities are now telling us that they find that language difficult, clearly we need to have a rather different discussion. I give way.

[Lord Lea of Crondall]

I thank the noble Lord for giving way. He may not be able to answer my next point tonight. However, as I understand it, charities registered with the Charity Commission cannot be so registered if they have political purposes. Therefore, will the noble Lord comment on, or write to me, about what he means when he talks about charities having political purposes?

[Lord Wallace of Saltaire]

I hesitate to go into a definition of politics as the noble Lord, Lord Norton, will immediately correct me. The promotion of particular policies, particularly broad policy areas, is a natural and accepted part of what charities and faith bodies do. That is a normal part of civil society. Part of my puzzlement, in listening to one or two of the speeches tonight, is that civil society is itself broader than the charitable sector. There are campaigning bodies in civil society which are not, and should not be, charities. Charities promote particular ideas, developments and social objectives which are also unavoidably political objectives, but they are not necessarily partisan objectives. That again is the line that we need to draw. I note that the noble and right reverend Lord, Lord Harries, said that charities are already unhappy about PPERA. Having looked at it, there are a number of difficult questions that we need—

[Lord Phillips of Sudbury]

It might be beneficial for all of us if the Minister and his advisers were to say how far the Charity Commission guidelines fall short of what the Bill is intending to do. If there is no significant air between the two, we might all need to know that.

[Lord Wallace of Saltaire]

I accept—and have also had it said to me in the Corridors—that we need to make sure that the guidance from the Electoral Commission, the Charity Commission and the Government are all in very close harmony. That is another area that we are, of course, now looking at.

The time is late. I will come very briefly to Part 3. Again, I recognise what has been said powerfully by a number of noble Lords here with trade union experience. We will come back to this in Committee, so I will say simply that unions are a major and extremely valuable aspect of our economy and our society. They have changed through a number of amalgamations over recent years and the Government consider the question of how accurate the membership lists of major unions are—we are talking about unions with 1 million or more members—is an appropriate point to be regulated. However, I take all the points—

[Baroness Royall of Blaisdon]

My Lords, we are talking about unions with a membership of more than 10,000, as I understand it; that is what is in the proposal, not 1 million.

[Lord Wallace of Saltaire]

However, we are not talking about the smallest unions.

I take the point from, I think, the noble Lord, Lord Whitty, about whether information given to the assurer or certification officer might fall into other hands. That is a large issue of data privacy—this was raised by another noble Lord—which raises broader issues that concern the Government across the board. I will give him my assurance now but I will also check back and make sure that there are cast-iron assurances that data privacy issues will be resolved. We will have—

[Lord Whitty]

I think it was my noble friend Lord, Lord Monks, who raised that point. The Minister has not yet said why the Government are proposing Part 3 of this Bill. There are all sorts of suspicions out there, some of which have been voiced tonight, including by me, but the Government have not told the House why they are proposing this part of the Bill.

[Lord Wallace of Saltaire]

My Lords, the Government are concerned that there is insufficient public understanding when, for example, a union calls a strike vote, that those being polled are those who are currently working. They wish to assure the members and others in society that the lists are accurate. This is not just for unions. Companies are also expected to maintain an accurate register of their members and shareholders and to keep it up to date. This will cover a range of different bodies. I give way once more and then we must finish.

[Lord Lea of Crondall]

Is the Minister aware that that is not the reason given in the explanatory document?

[Lord Wallace of Saltaire]

My Lords, we will return to the explanatory document at a later stage. This has been an extremely vigorous evening. We look forward to several days in Committee and on Report. The Government will consult a range of stakeholders between Second Reading and Committee, and we will continue to consult between Committee and Report. This House will, as the noble Lord, Lord Greaves, assured me very vigorously, look in detail at the language of the Bill and also look back at the language of PPERA, and, we hope, produce something of which we can all be proud at the end of the day.

[Lord Hardie]

I wonder whether the Minister will address the concerns of local action groups, as opposed to charities.

--- Later in debate ---

[Lord Wallace of Saltaire]

I am sorry; I did not hear the noble and learned Lord.

[Lord Hardie]

I was asking about local action groups as opposed to charities.

[Lord Wallace of Saltaire]

My Lords, local action groups, if they are not campaigning for or against a particular candidate or a particular party, will not fall within the terms of the Bill.

[Lord Hardie]

The Minister obviously did not hear my speech. I referred to the situation where a local action group had a particular interest—for example, against the closure of a hospital or against, or in favour of, HS2, or other environmental situations. If one candidate supported that view and another candidate was opposed to it, that would be controlled expenditure. Is that to be stopped?

[Lord Wallace of Saltaire]

In the case of Kidderminster Hospital, which I think was one of the examples quoted, there was indeed a candidate who was the Kidderminster Hospital candidate. That of course then becomes a much clearer case.

The hour is late and I should like, if I may, to continue these discussions in the Corridors between Second Reading and Committee.

Bill read a second time and committed to a Committee of the Whole House.

Syria: Peace Initiative

Lord Wallace of Saltaire Excerpts

Tuesday 15th October 2013 Lords Chamber

[Lord Truscott]

To ask Her Majesty’s Government whether they consider that the recent Russian-led Syrian peace initiative provides a model for defusing other international crises, for example relating to Iran.

[Lord Wallace of Saltaire (LD)]

My Lords, we welcome UN Security Council Resolution 2118, which determines how Syria’s chemical weapons must be eliminated. However, the conflict continues—this is not a broader peace initiative. Syria’s use of chemical weapons presents different security challenges to Iran’s nuclear programme but there has been a similar international response. The UN Security Council has agreed six UN resolutions on Iran’s nuclear programme, all of which Iran remains in breach of. We hope that Iran will engage substantively with the UNSC mandated E3+3 to resolve the nuclear issue.

[Lord Truscott (Non-Afl)]

I thank the Minister for that reply and I declare an interest as Vladimir Putin’s biographer. Many people would argue that the Russian-led Syrian peace plan is the most significant peace initiative this year. To recognise this and to encourage Russia in its peace-making endeavours, a few hours ago I nominated President Putin for the Nobel Peace Prize. Will Her Majesty’s Government do the same?

--- Later in debate ---

[Lord Wallace of Saltaire]

My Lords, this has been a joint US-Russian peace initiative, it is not purely a Russian-led one. We welcome the constructive response that the Russian Government are now making on Syria and we hope and expect that the Russians will ensure that President Assad and his regime are represented at the Geneva II peace conference when it meets at the end of November. We hope and expect, but we do not yet know.

[Lord Hannay of Chiswick (CB)]

Will the Minister correct the noble Lord who spoke before and remind him that the idea of getting Syria to surrender its chemical weapons was raised in this House rather before President Putin raised it? More seriously, will he state that in the event of Syria transgressing the Security Council resolution, the Government would not necessarily be bound by the vote that took place in the other place at the end of August?

[Lord Wallace of Saltaire]

My Lords, we have to recognise—and I say this as a Liberal who believes in international order and is very reluctant to condone the use of force—that without the threat of force we might not have reached the position we have so far reached in Syria. Just as with the opening to Iran, without the very extensive sanctions against it we might not be having the discussions that we are now having with the Iranian Government. One has to use diplomacy as far as one can, but the big stick behind it sometimes helps.

[Baroness Falkner of Margravine (LD)]

Does my noble friend agree that in conflict resolution it is not so much a model that brings about change but the facts on the ground? In Iran there has been limited but nevertheless very welcome regime change, in Syria there has not. Can my noble friend tell the House whether Her Majesty’s Government are now receptive to Iranians participating in the Geneva II conference?

[Lord Wallace of Saltaire]

My Lords, we would welcome Iranian participation in the Geneva II peace conference. However, as UN Resolution 2118 spells out, the Geneva II peace conference is based on acceptance of the Geneva I communiqué, and Iran has not yet signalled that it accepts the basis of that communiqué.

[Lord Campbell-Savours (Lab)]

My Lords, during the Recess, at the beginning of September, there were UPI international press reports from a reputable source that the Russians were accusing the Syrian opposition of using chemical weapons. There seemed to be almost a conspiracy of silence in the western press about these accusations. What actually happened in the Foreign Office? Was that information followed up, and if it was, what was the conclusion of any inquiry?

[Lord Wallace of Saltaire]

My Lords, Russian allegations were made. There have been investigations, in so far as it is possible to pursue investigations on the ground within Syria at present, and all the evidence to which I have had access suggests that the opposition did not have access to chemical weapons and certainly did not have the capacity to use chemical weapons on the scale on which they were used on 21 September.

[The Lord Bishop of Leicester]

My Lords, does the Minister agree that this shift in fortunes in Syria is very largely due to the relationship of trust that the United States Secretary of State and the Russian Foreign Minister have developed in recent months, and that similar levels of trust will be vital to resolving other pressing international crises, not least with Iran?

[Lord Wallace of Saltaire]

My Lords, I agree. I should also say that the British Foreign Secretary has worked extremely hard over the past nine months and more to come to terms with the Russians and to develop a relationship with the Russian Foreign Minister. The European Union high representative, the noble Baroness, Lady Ashton, has also done a great deal of work with the Russians on Syria and as part of the E3+3 on Iran.

[Lord Hylton (CB)]

My Lords, I welcome very much the first steps in restoring diplomatic relations with Iran and the Foreign Secretary’s meeting with his Iranian counterpart. Does the Minister agree that Iran can be enormously helpful in Syria, Lebanon and Afghanistan, as well as in the other country mentioned by the right reverend Prelate? If there is progress on these fronts, would that not justify further steps in normalising our relations?

[Lord Wallace of Saltaire]

Of course it would. However, we are proceeding slowly and cautiously. There was an Iranian invasion of the British embassy compound only two years ago and we are conscious, as the Foreign Secretary said in his Statement to the Commons the other day, that the Iranian political system is a complex structure and that to be President of Iran is not necessarily to command all power in Iran. When President Rouhani returned most recently he was cheered in the streets of Tehran, but he was booed and his car was apparently pelted by members of the Basij militia.

[Lord Triesman (Lab)]

My Lords, I probably should start by making it clear that it is no part of the Official Opposition’s policy to nominate President Putin for the Nobel Peace Prize. The initiatives on Syria, particularly in relation to chemical weapons, are plainly welcome, although there is much more to do on Geneva II. I understand that the Foreign Secretary has done some months’ work on deepening the relationship with Russia, but it does not seem to have deepened enough for it to be a reliable way of achieving the objective in the effort to defuse crises. What positive steps will the Government take, perhaps with the United States and France, to deepen that relationship so that it is more reliable?

[Lord Wallace of Saltaire]

As noble Lords will know, the Russians are not easy companions. Foreign Minister Lavrov is giving a big speech in Brussels today, I understand, on the relationship between Russia and Europe as a whole. Although we welcome the more constructive relationship that we are having at present on a number of Middle Eastern problems, we are also moving towards the EU summit at the end of November on the Eastern Partnership, and Russian behaviour towards Ukraine, Armenia, Moldova and Georgia regarding the possibility of those states signing association agreements with the European Union is, to say the least, not particularly constructive, nor is the effort that it is making to interrupt Lithuanian exports to Russia.

European Parliamentary Elections (Amendment) Regulations 2013

Lord Wallace of Saltaire Excerpts

Tuesday 15th October 2013 Grand Committee

Moved by

[Lord Wallace of Saltaire]

That the Grand Committee do report to the House that it has considered the European Parliamentary Elections (Amendment) Regulations 2013.

Relevant documents: 8th Report from the Joint Committee on Statutory Instruments

[Lord Wallace of Saltaire (LD)]

My Lords, these regulations make updates to the rules for the administration and conduct of European elections. They flow from changes made for UK parliamentary elections in the Electoral Registration and Administration Act 2013 and associated secondary legislation, with which a number of us have been much concerned over the past two years. They also provide for the implementation of an EU directive concerning non-national EU citizens standing as candidates at European parliamentary elections, and make other changes to the administration and conduct of these elections.

These amendments are needed to support the effective administration of the European parliamentary elections that will be held on 22 May 2014. The measures are designed to improve the accessibility and security of the voting process and to implement a number of recommendations which have been made by, among others, the Electoral Commission and the Association of Electoral Administrators since the previous European parliamentary elections in 2009.

The Cabinet Office has consulted on these regulations with the Electoral Commission and with others such as the Association of Electoral Administrators, SOLACE and the territorial offices, and with colleagues in the Government of Gibraltar. We were fully involved in the discussions about the new directive with the European Commission, and have worked to ensure that its implementation is proportionate and workable in the UK context.

While the Electoral Registration and Administration Act made a number of changes to the rules for UK elections, which were set out in primary legislation, noble Lords will be aware that the rules for European elections are set out in secondary legislation. These regulations, therefore, make the corresponding updates for the European parliamentary elections.

I now turn to the key measures in the regulations. They enable postal votes to be despatched further in advance of polling day, which will be of particular help to those at remote locations, particularly overseas, including service voters, as it will give them more time to receive, complete and return their postal vote in time for it to be counted. Providing for postal votes to be issued as soon as practicable at an election will facilitate the early despatch of postal votes soon after the close of nominations, and earlier than the 11th day before the poll, which is the earliest postal votes may be issued to many postal voters at present. As a consequence of the earlier despatch of postal votes, the regulations also ensure that electors can continue to cancel their postal vote and arrange instead to vote in person or by proxy, provided that they do this before the postal vote application deadline—that is, at least 11 working days before the poll—and that the postal ballot papers have not already been completed and returned to the returning officer. This ensures that the current flexibility afforded to electors to change their voting arrangements is maintained.

The regulations also introduce a set of up to date voter-facing forms and notices, including poll cards, postal voting statements and the ballot paper, which are intended to make the voting process more accessible. This reflects moves in recent years to modernise the appearance of voter-facing forms at newly created polls such as the police and crime commissioner elections and the 2011 referendum on the parliamentary voting system. The revised material has been produced following a programme of public user testing and consultation with the Electoral Commission, the Association of Electoral Administrators, territorial offices, electoral services suppliers and with Scope.

Noble Lords will recall that, during the passage of the ERA Act, the Government listened to considerable parliamentary concern about the need to ensure that there is a mechanism in place to deal with any queues which might form at polling stations at close of poll, given the isolated but highly publicised instances of queues at polling stations at the 2010 election. These regulations therefore reflect for European parliamentary elections the Act’s provision for UK parliamentary elections, whereby voters waiting in a queue at the close of poll—that is, at 10 pm on polling day—for the purpose of voting, may be issued with a ballot paper and cast their vote. Let me be clear, however, that this provision is not intended as a substitute for proper planning by regional and local returning officers at elections. It is for these returning officers to make sufficient provision in the number of polling stations and staffing levels to manage the volumes of electors likely to vote at polling stations.

On a related note, these regulations contain a key measure to ensure that returning officers are accountable, reflecting as they do for European parliamentary elections the ERA Act’s provision for UK parliamentary elections whereby returning officers’ fees may be reduced or withheld by the Secretary of State following a recommendation by the Electoral Commission.

The regulations put into legislation that all postal votes are to be subject to a key security check, whereby the signature and date of birth on the postal voting statement are checked against records. This improves upon the current requirement to check at least 20% of postal votes. While 100% checking has been funded at previous elections and has been achieved by a large proportion of returning officers, we want to ensure that all postal votes are subject to the same high level of scrutiny.

The regulations also include a related measure which requires EROs to inform electors after a poll where their postal vote has been rejected because the signature or date of birth, which are used as postal vote identifiers, that they have supplied on the postal voting statement failed to match those held on record, or where they had simply been left blank. This is to help ensure that those electors can participate effectively in future elections and not have their ballot papers rejected at successive polls because of a signature degradation or because they are making inadvertent errors. This will help legitimate voters who submit their postal ballot packs in good faith to avoid their vote being rejected at subsequent elections.

It will also provide EROs with the flexibility to challenge postal votes where there is any cause for concern about their validity. Given that EROs will not be obliged to inform individuals where fraud is suspected, there is an opportunity for any such suspicions to be collated and reported to the police, where that is warranted. This measure ensures that particular attention is paid to the way in which mismatches appear and provides an opportunity to identify patterns or anomalies which may indicate that malpractice has been attempted. The regulations also permit those who had planned to vote in person but are called away at very short notice before polling day on business or military service to appoint an “emergency” proxy to vote on their behalf, which builds on the current facility for those taken ill.

The regulations also provide for police community support officers to enter polling stations and counting venues under the same conditions as police constables, in line with the corresponding provisions in the ERA Act. This will allow police forces additional flexibility in deploying their resources on polling day and allow them to provide a greater visible reassurance to the public.

Finally, the regulations implement a European Council directive that amends the existing Council directive, which provides that EU citizens living in a member state of which they are not nationals may vote and stand as a candidate in European parliamentary elections in their state of residence. The position at previous European parliamentary elections was that a candidate who wished to stand for election in the UK and who was an EU citizen, but not a UK, Irish or Commonwealth citizen, had to provide certification from their own member state of citizenship that they were not disqualified from standing in European parliamentary elections in that state when submitting their nomination for candidacy. Under the new directive, from the 2014 polls onwards, that will change and candidates or nominating officers will be able to ask the UK Government to request information from their home member state. This requirement is to be applied across all member states and is intended to remove a perceived barrier to non-nationals standing for election in the member states in which they reside. Furthermore, the existing provision allowing candidates to obtain the declaration themselves will remain in place as an alternative, should candidates and parties choose it. The Government will liaise closely with colleagues and regional returning officers in the process of implementing the directive.

Overall, these provisions make sensible and relevant changes for the conduct and administration of European elections in line with those being made for UK parliamentary elections. They are designed to increase voter participation, further improve the integrity of our electoral system and ensure that the processes underpinning our elections are both more robust and more relevant to the needs of voters. I commend these regulations to the Committee.

[Lord Teverson (LD)]

My Lords, I welcome these regulations and particularly like the Minister’s optimism about planning for queues at European elections. Let us hope that that problem arises and we can show that this new robust system actually works. Somehow I suspect that it might not be the case but let us hope so. I should perhaps declare an interest in that I am a director of a company that, as a minor part of its business, prints ballot papers, including, probably, for the European elections.

I welcome all the regulations but just wanted to check something around equal treatment. I am particularly pleased that it is now easier for non-nationals of the UK and Ireland to put forward their candidacy, and that there are fewer barriers to that happening. However, I would like to understand whether and how Irish and Gibraltarian—and even UK—citizens are checked for potential disqualification. I can see that we are moving towards national authority where European states other than the UK and Republic of Ireland are concerned, but do we check disqualification for people from Gibraltar, the United Kingdom and Ireland?

The other matter on which I wanted to catch up is the date for the European elections, where a range of dates is set. Have the Government considered moving to a Sunday, like most of the rest of the European Union? That could be an experiment to see whether we could increase voting by holding the election at the weekend. Can the Minister also tell me whether next year’s local elections will go back to June, or the date for the European elections?

Finally, a much more strategic question: when do the Government intend to introduce open lists—as opposed to closed lists—for these elections, so that citizens can make real choices, rather than ones thrust upon them by a clique of political parties—of which, of course, we are all members and should therefore declare an interest.

[Baroness Hayter of Kentish Town (Lab)]

My Lords, on this side of the House, we welcome the regulations, including the provision for telling those whose postal votes are rejected the reasons for such a rejection so that they can correct the mistake next time. We welcome the checks on postal votes. Along with the noble Lord, Lord Teverson, we also welcome making it easier for people to stand for election in countries other than those where they are citizens.

Before going on to questions about the actual regulations, I draw the Committee’s attention to the fact—which has already been alluded to by the noble Lord, Lord Teverson, and by the Minister—that this election also covers the people of Gibraltar. With this in mind, we were concerned by the quite false suggestion made by the Minister’s colleague in the House on 10 October—whether on behalf of the Government or the Conservative candidates in the European elections we do not know. The noble Baroness, Lady Warsi said that,

“we are incredibly clear about the sovereignty and the sovereign position of the Gibraltarian people. It is nice to hear that the Opposition now share this view”.

My noble friend Lady Royall of Blaisdon remonstrated with this quite outrageous implication, saying,

“the Minister said that the Opposition now support the people of Gibraltar. I would like to make it clear, and have it on the record, that my party has always supported the citizens of Gibraltar and their self-determination”.

One might have thought that sufficient for the former chair of the Conservative Party, but she added insult to injury by saying:

“It is incredibly heartening to hear that. It therefore puts my mind at rest, certainly in relation to the potential sovereignty crisis”.—[Official Report, 10/10/13; cols. 177-78.]

I therefore ask the Minister, as he oversees all the rules and regulations, including these ones governing the European elections in Gibraltar, to ensure that the administration of the vote is carefully overseen by the Electoral Commission, so that it is fair to all candidates in the South West England constituency.

I turn to the question of the close of poll. Contrary to what the Minister’s then colleague, Miss Chloe Smith, said in introducing the regulations in the other House—words repeated today by the Minister—the Government did not listen to what Parliament said about the queue at 10 pm and being able to vote, and had to be forced to do so by a vote in this House. Sadly, the Government continue to fail to listen, including to the Electoral Commission, which has a certain professional expertise in these matters. They did not listen over that issue and they are not listening now over the Transparency of Lobbying, Non-party Campaigning and Trade Union Administration Bill, where they failed to consult the Electoral Commission before dreaming up Part 2. They are still resisting a large number of concerns that the Electoral Commission has about it, in particular the demands on the commission to make new sorts of judgments and to register a swathe of new organisations and, in particular, its worry that it will not have the resources to do so satisfactorily.

However, this concerns the current regulations which, again, will require the Electoral Commission to produce guidance, particularly on the matter of the time when postal votes can be handed in. As the Minister knows, the commission continues to raise some important questions over that wording. Can he give us a reassurance that the commission will be able to manage all the new expectations being laid on it by the lobbying Bill, together with its work on these European elections, which are to run concurrently with the local elections?

I have two further minor points to raise. In the debate in the Commons, Mr Graham Stringer MP asked:

“Are the European regulations on personation the same as those that apply in our general elections? Is a record kept of ballot papers, as it is in general elections, if personation occurs?”.—[Official Report, Commons, Sixth Delegated Legislation Committee, 12/9/13; col 6.]

The Minister in another place promised him a written response. Unfortunately, I have not managed to locate it, but perhaps the noble Lord will be able to read the answer into the record today.

Finally, in earlier exchanges on other statutory instruments, I thought that every opportunity was going to be used to forewarn people about the forthcoming move to individual electoral registration. I was therefore very disappointed that in my own area, Camden, absolutely no mention of the move to IER is made on the latest registration form, which has been done in time for the European elections; nor, I am assured, do the forms for Harrow or Lambeth. Does the Minister know what action is being taken more generally to prepare for this somewhat hurried change? As he knows, the commencement order to bring IER into force is due to be made on 8 November. Can he confirm that that is still the date, especially as we have yet to see the details of the outcome of the live data-matching trials using DWP records, which took place over the summer? In some instances, they matched fewer than half of the records. We have not seen a list of the particular areas, but it may be that he has that information to hand. Perhaps he could also clarify how much work is due to be undertaken by electoral registration officers on IER at the same time as they are running the combined European and local elections. Most importantly, is he satisfied that they have the resources for both of these challenging tasks?

[Lord Wallace of Saltaire]

My Lords, I thank the noble Baroness, Lady Hayter, for that fighting speech which has enlivened our afternoon. I shall try to answer her questions as well as I can. The noble Lord, Lord Teverson, asked me about open lists versus closed lists. It is probably fair to say that there is no common view within the coalition on this, nor is there between the Government and the Opposition, so it is a matter on which we hope there will continue to be some form of debate. It is certainly the case that next year the local elections will be held on the same day as the European elections, on 22 May, but will then return to their otherwise normal date the following year.

He also asked about moving polling to a Sunday. All sorts of suggestions have been made for encouraging people to vote and making it easier for them to do so, including possibly having two days of voting over a Saturday and a Sunday. The problem with many of them is that the additional costs in staffing terms would be quite considerable, and thus these suggestions have not yet gained the degree of traction that I suspect the noble Lord might like.

On the question of how far we are checking the qualifications of voters in Ireland and Gibraltar, I had better write to the noble Lord to make sure that I get the answer entirely right. The noble Baroness, Lady Hayter, proclaimed the depth of the Labour Party’s commitment to the sovereignty of Gibraltar. Perhaps I might be allowed to repeat something that I said some years ago when this question came up. Under the 30-year rule, papers were released on discussions within the then Conservative Government in 1971-72, when a spat with the Spanish over Gibraltar was in full spate. The Foreign Secretary scribbled on one paper that perhaps one ought to consider possible alternatives. One alternative came up from a relatively junior member of the Foreign Office, who suggested that one might perhaps think of assigning the governance of Gibraltar to the Knights of St John on Malta. A senior official scribbled: “Have you ever met the Knights of Malta? You might as well give the sovereignty of Gibraltar to the Young Liberals”. The reason I use this example is that I once intervened on a Question under the Labour Government and the Minister responsible for negotiating with the Spanish Government had been the national president of the Young Liberals in 1971-72. I pass that on as an anecdote for a pub quiz, if the noble Baroness wishes to take part in one. I was very disappointed that the noble Baroness did not ask me how many postal voters there were on Gibraltar for the most recent European elections. I could have assured her that it was probably fewer than 100. The entire electoral roll is about 20,000.

I take her point about the demands on the Electoral Commission. We will come back to that in the transparency of lobbying Bill, which I am sure we will all enjoy discussing from Second Reading on 22 or 23 October.

On the question of personation, I am assured that the rules for personation in European elections are the same as those that apply to UK parliamentary and other elections. The intention of the regulations is precisely to reconcile as far as possible the regulations for national parliamentary, local and European elections.

I take the noble Baroness’s point that there is no mention on the papers going out at the moment of the move towards individual electoral registration. Perhaps I may take that back and be in touch with her again, because I entirely agree that we need to make people think about the change as soon as possible, and must consider how best to alert people about our move to it. I admit that, as usual, the effective head of my household filled in our Wandsworth and Saltaire election forms again this year, and that I did not check what she did. Therefore, I cannot tell the noble Baroness whether either the Bradford or the Wandsworth electoral forms alerted us to individual electoral registration.

I hope that I have answered all the questions that were raised in the debate, and I commend the regulations to the Committee.

Motion agreed.

Church of England: Appointment of Bishops

Lord Wallace of Saltaire Excerpts

Monday 14th October 2013 Lords Chamber

[Lord Trefgarne]

To ask Her Majesty’s Government what discussions they have had with the Church of England about the procedure for the appointment of bishops in the Church of England.

[Lord Wallace of Saltaire (LD)]

My Lords, the current procedure for the appointment of bishops to the Church of England was agreed by the previous Government in 2008 after consultation with the church and the publication of a White Paper, The Governance of Britain. There have been no further discussions between the Government and the church on this issue since 2008 and the Government see no need to initiate any such discussions.

[Lord Trefgarne (Con)]

My Lords, I am grateful to the Minister for that Answer. Is it not the case that bishops are retiring faster than they are being appointed? In a little while, there will be none at all. If the most reverend Primate’s diary is so congested that he cannot find time for additional meetings of the Crown Nominations Commission, would it not be a good idea to reappoint the noble Lord, Lord Luce, who chaired that committee so effectively when it came to choosing the most reverend Primate?

[Lord Wallace of Saltaire]

My Lords, I am informed that there are currently four vacancies for diocesan bishops and two forthcoming retirements. There is also the issue of the new combined diocese of Leeds. I accept that the Church of England has a rather lengthy consultation procedure before new bishops are appointed. I spoke to the joint secretaries of the Crown Nominations Commission last week, who were in Hereford consulting members of the diocese on the nature and needs of the diocese and thus the characteristics they wanted in a new bishop. That seems entirely desirable. I understand that in the diocese of Guildford, with which the noble Lord, Lord Trefgarne, will be concerned, the bishop is due to retire at the end of November. It is likely that his successor, after this consultation, will be agreed in June or July next year.

[Lord Faulkner of Worcester (Lab)]

My Lords, what assistance are Her Majesty’s Government giving to the most reverend Primate the Archbishop of Canterbury in redressing the gender imbalance on the Bishops’ Benches in your Lordships’ House?

[Lord Wallace of Saltaire]

My Lords, the Church of England is moving with all deliberate speed towards the appointment of women bishops. I think it quite possible that the first women bishops will be consecrated before we have reached the next stage of House of Lords reform.

[Baroness Brinton (LD)]

My Lords, synthesising the two previous questions, will the Minister tell us how many women clerics are in a senior position in the Church of England? Does he agree that a large number of vacancies might be helpful for the promotion of the majority of very good senior women to bishoprics as and when the Church of England approves their appointment?

[Lord Wallace of Saltaire]

It is desirable that dioceses nevertheless continue to appoint bishops. I know a number of senior women in the Church of England and have a great deal of respect for them. One of them is the wife of my good friend the Vicar of Putney. I have no doubt that in time, the Church of England will have a number of excellent women bishops in the same way that it now has a number of excellent archdeacons, canons, and others from the female sex.

[Lord Foulkes of Cumnock (Lab)]

My Lords, will the Minister confirm that one of the great things about Church of England bishops is that their number in this House has an upper limit, whereas coalition Peers seem to be flooding in with no apparent upper limit? Are there any members of the Liberal Democrat Party who are not in the House of Lords?

[Lord Wallace of Saltaire]

I am sorry that the noble Lord, Lord Foulkes, did not take the other path appropriate to the Question, which is that the Bench of Bishops is the only section of this Chamber that has an upper age limit, which is 70.

[Lord Cormack (Con)]

My Lords, after that hilarious question from the noble Lord, Lord Foulkes, does my noble friend agree with me that it is somewhat unfortunate that Episcopal vacancies are now advertised? Is there not an anti-vocationary element there?

--- Later in debate ---

[Lord Wallace of Saltaire]

It may simply be a useful movement towards transparency. I know there are those who would like the Church of England to remain as it was 150 years ago or more, but as a member of the Church of England, I am extremely happy that it has moved and modernised over the last few years.

[The Lord Bishop of Leicester]

My Lords, is the Minister aware that, typically, the Crown Nominations Commission consults some 100 members of civil society in each region to which appointments are made; that legislation to bring forward the possibility of women bishops is now before the General Synod and it is anticipated that it will be brought into law within two years; and that the Archbishop of Canterbury takes a very keen interest in the proceedings of this House, and will take careful note of any concerns about the speed of Episcopal appointments made in the course of this Question Time?

[Lord Wallace of Saltaire]

I thank the right reverend Prelate for his question. In consulting when preparing for this Question, I was struck by how many of the people I spoke to said, “You have to understand that the workload of a diocesan bishop is enormous and that some wish to retire before the age of 70 because they feel they have done more than they can sustain for more than 10 to 15 years”.

[Baroness Royall of Blaisdon (Lab)]

My Lords, will the Minister join me in congratulating the Church of England on all the splendid work that it does in its dioceses, especially with people who are suffering so much under the austerity programme of this Government? Will he also join me in congratulating the Church of Wales on its vote in favour of women bishops?

[Lord Wallace of Saltaire]

I am very happy to do so, and I look forward to the Church of England following in good time.

Israel and Palestine

Lord Wallace of Saltaire Excerpts

Thursday 10th October 2013 Grand Committee

[Lord Stirrup]

To ask Her Majesty’s Government what assessment they have made of prospects for progress towards an agreement between Israel and Palestine on a two-state solution.

[Lord Wallace of Saltaire (LD)]

My Lords, before we start, two speakers have scratched. This would allow us to stretch to four minutes for the other speakers, if that huge addition to the length of their speeches might please noble Lords.

[Lord Stirrup (CB)]

My Lords, I am most grateful for this opportunity to discuss the current status of the Middle East peace process, and I am particularly grateful that so many eminent and knowledgeable noble Lords will be lending their expertise to the subject over the next hour.

An hour is of course far too short a time in which to do justice to the importance and complexity of the issues involved. Nor would I expect the Minister to disclose the detailed nature and status of the ongoing Israeli-Palestinian negotiations, even if the UK was aware of them, which I rather doubt. We must trust that the US Secretary of State and his team will do their utmost to secure a successful outcome, recognising that we have little direct influence on the process.

However, if that is so, then what purpose might we set ourselves in this debate here today? We could, of course, remind ourselves of the many difficulties involved: the delineation of boundaries, the settlements, the status of Jerusalem, the right of return and so on. For my part, however, I will focus on three issues where I think we could and should go beyond just enthusiastic support for Secretary Kerry, where UK intellectual effort, advocacy and, in some cases, practical involvement might add value to the whole endeavour.

The first of these issues concerns the fundamental proposition that there should be a two-state solution. This has been questioned in the past, and there continue to be voices, perhaps increasing in number, arguing against it. The Foreign Secretary has himself suggested that time may be running out for a two-state solution. That must of course raise the question of what happens if time does indeed run out: what comes next? Some suggest that the time for such a solution is in fact long past—that some sort of single-state solution is the only realistic way forward. Many of these voices, although by no means all, are in Israel. But is it conceivable that an Israeli state that incorporated the present Occupied Territories could remain both Jewish and democratic?

If the right of Palestinian refugees to return to their previous homes is a device to undermine the state of Israel through demographics, as some would argue, then surely a one-state solution would achieve the same end, perhaps even more decisively. The UK Government remain committed to a negotiated two-state solution. This leads me to two conclusions. The first is that the UK needs to engage intellectually with those who argue against such a proposition. We should add our voices to a continuing international effort in this regard, rather than just assuming that the argument has been won for good and all. The second is that we need to do all we can to ensure that the window for a two-state solution remains open for as long as is necessary. While of course we want to engender a sense of urgency, we should be careful about suggesting the existence of cliff edges—or closed windows, if you prefer—lest we paint ourselves into an intellectual corner.

We all hope that something substantive emerges from the current negotiations, but long years of weary experience counsel us to rein in our expectations. In situations such as this, one has to combine long-term optimism with a grimly realistic short-term outlook. However, if the UK view is truly that the window for a two-state solution will soon close, then long-term optimism becomes Panglossian, and we should therefore be thinking now about alternatives, unpalatable though they might be. Is this truly the ground on which we wish to stand? I rather doubt it, and I certainly doubt the wisdom of even hinting at such a thing. The lessons of history suggest that, in cases such as this, one must never give up, never despair, no matter how dark the road might become.

The UK’s position, and therefore its message to others, should surely be that no matter how long it takes, no matter the setbacks, the international community must and will keep coming back to the issue, will keep bringing the parties back together, and will keep banging their heads against the brick wall until the wall one day starts to crumble.

The second issue that I want to raise concerns an important precondition for any enduring agreement between the Israelis and the Palestinians. In political negotiations such as these, it is not sufficient for the leaders to agree upon the terms of a solution. They have to be able to carry with them sufficient of their constituents to enable them to turn any agreement into political reality on the ground. They will never convince everyone, but they need sufficient popular support to sustain them through what will no doubt be difficult and controversial times.

Much of this task will of course fall to the politicians on either side, but I suspect that they will need all the help they can get. So we should think hard about which international actors could wield the kind of influence necessary to condition the debates within both Israel and Palestine. The United States certainly has a role to play here. However, it no longer, I suggest, has quite the economic and moral strength that in old days might have helped it move heaven and earth. The UK is certainly no better placed in terms of direct influence; but perhaps our influence with third parties might be of some use in such an endeavour.

The contribution of the Arab League nations, even when somewhat divided, was an important factor in the recent resumption of talks. They and other countries in the region will continue to be important in the development, and particularly in the acceptance, of any solution. We have many friends among these countries with whom we might constructively engage over the coming months, in support of both the peace process itself and the means by which any agreement might be implemented.

With regard to the Israelis, I regret that we have even less direct influence than with the Palestinians. We seem to have allowed relations between our two countries to enter a sort of limbo. Indeed, it took me most of my tenure as Chief of the Defence Staff to persuade the Foreign Office that I should be allowed even to visit my Israeli counterpart.

I am pleased to say that things have improved somewhat in recent years but we are still playing catch-up, and we are seeing today the difficulties that playing catch-up presents for us when we seek to influence invents within the world. We do, though, have many individuals in the UK who maintain important contacts within Israel. Perhaps we need to think about mobilising this community in support of the current process, and exploring how it might contribute to the debate in Israel. This is no doubt already happening in an ad hoc fashion, but is there not some way we can mobilise this important resource to make up, at least in part, for our lack of direct national influence?

The third issue that I want to touch on is the question of security. One does not have to be a military genius to understand that Israel’s pre-1967 borders were a strategic nightmare. If we were simply to return to this situation, give or take elements of land swap, without providing a greater degree of defensive depth for Israel, then we would be putting in place an inherently unstable arrangement—one that in time would be highly likely to fail. On the other hand, Israel’s demand to exercise unilateral control over Palestinian airspace and in the Jordan Valley does not sit comfortably with the notion of Palestinian sovereignty.

Some have suggested that the answer is to involve NATO. However, the Israelis are very sceptical about such an arrangement. They view with an understandably jaundiced eye the international community’s record in the Lebanon, and would be loath to put their security in the hands of such a force in the Jordan Valley. I believe that the question of airspace control can be worked out relatively easily. There are many examples of allies—which is what Israel and Palestine would have to be—pooling responsibility for air defence and putting in place the necessary arrangements for unified airspace.

With regard to the Jordan Valley, only a degree of international involvement is likely to soothe Palestinian sensitivities. However, international involvement has to be what the Israelis are prepared to accept, even if reluctantly. This is an issue on which General Allen, the previous Commander of US Central Command, is currently working for Secretary Kerry. It is also an issue in which the UK has great expertise and to which it might make a significant long-term contribution. With that in mind, has the Ministry of Defence undertaken any discussions on the subject with the Pentagon? Has the ministry begun any assessment of the likely contribution that the UK might make to an international force? Of course these are early days, and we would not want to get ahead of ourselves, let alone of the negotiations. However, it is an area where some preliminary analysis could be of value, and certainly it is an issue on which we should be liaising closely with the Americans.

There is much else to be said about the Israeli-Palestinian negotiations, but I will close with a wider observation. We seem to be witnessing—finally—the unravelling of the San Remo decisions and of the other attempts to tidy away the detritus of the Ottoman Empire after the First World War. The UK played a major role in that process. Although we may now be somewhat diminished on the international stage, we have an obligation to do all in our power to help address the consequent problems. Practical support for a continuing and enduring effort to resolve the Israel-Palestine issue must surely be the cornerstone of such efforts.

--- Later in debate ---

[Lord Hannay of Chiswick (CB)]

My Lords, ever since President Obama’s new Secretary of State, John Kerry, began, as his top priority, to reassemble the well-worn components of that oxymoron known as the Middle East peace process, he has been subjected to a deluge of denigration, disparagement and weary cynicism from the serried ranks of pundits, many of whom have broken their teeth on that problem over the years. Now, with the removal of Syria’s chemical weapons and the convening of a Geneva 2 conference aimed at ending the Syrian civil war taking centre stage, that chorus is, if anything, louder. Is that disparagement justified as simple, common-sense realism, or is it a short-sighted unwillingness to recognise an opportunity where one really exists? I unhesitatingly argue the latter, which is why I welcome the noble and gallant Lord’s initiative in initiating this debate.

One reason for thinking that there is an opportunity, oddly, is because the Arab-Israeli dispute is not, for once, the focus of diplomatic preoccupations in the Middle East. That could be an advantage. In the past, excessive public focus on the issue has often led to the rhetorical radicalisation of the respective negotiating positions of the parties. Perhaps all concerned should reflect on whether they can be quite so sure that the outsiders on whom they rely will be ready to pull their chestnuts out of the fire in some future conflagration.

That thought could concentrate the minds of the Israelis, whose US backers seem increasingly dubious about any direct military involvement in the Middle East. It could also concentrate the minds of the Palestinians, whose Arab backers are focusing their efforts on other problems—domestic in the case of Egypt, and international in the case of Saudi Arabia. It could also influence Hamas, which is increasingly bereft of external support. If those trends get the direct parties to the dispute to focus on their own negotiating positions, and on compromises that they will need to strike if a peace deal is to be achieved, the prospects for progress could be improved.

Then there are more classical arguments for giving this renewed effort to reach a negotiated solution a real chance. We should not delude ourselves; the fact that the Arab-Israeli dispute is not currently centre stage does not mean that it has lost any of its explosive potential. Indeed, the fact that we almost certainly face several decades of instability in the Middle East, as the aftershocks of the Arab awakening work themselves out, only increases that potential. Meanwhile the continued Israeli settlement building on the West Bank inevitably pushes the situation towards insolubility and drives Israel towards something that it is no hyperbole to call an apartheid regime. These outcomes must surely be avoided if they possibly can be.

Are there any new elements that could usefully be injected into the process without destabilising it? One such idea might be to give more serious consideration to the guarantees that could be entrenched, both for Jewish minorities in a future Palestinian state, and for Arab minorities in Israel. This aspect has been neglected for far too long. Does it really make sense to think that every single Jewish settler will need to be removed—by force if necessary—from the territory of the Palestinian state, and that the substantial Arab population of Israel should be treated for ever as second-class citizens? I doubt it. That said, the logic of the situation is that outsiders—influential as they inevitably are and will be, and necessary as effective supporters and perhaps guarantors of any negotiated solution—should be less prominent than they have been in the negotiating process. Rather than negotiating, they should be talking with all those who will need to be party to any settlement. I urge—as I have done an awful lot of times—that we should be ready to talk to anyone who is prepared to operate within the scope of the Arab peace initiative. That should include Hamas.

It will be interesting to hear the Government’s views on this, and I hope that we will not remain, as we were in the past, too chained to the axle of American policy. The US is in a different position from us and I hope that we will be able, with our European partners, to play an active role in the months ahead.

[Lord Wallace of Saltaire (LD)]

My Lords, we are very tight on time. If noble Lords could be very strict in sitting down as soon as they see the four minutes come up, I should be grateful.

Syria and the Use of Chemical Weapons

Lord Wallace of Saltaire Excerpts

Thursday 29th August 2013 Lords Chamber

[Lord Wallace of Saltaire]

My Lords, I start by thanking the noble Lord, Lord Triesman, for that extremely constructive speech, and by saying that this is very much an area in which the Government are looking for the widest possible consensus across the parties. I have spent much of the past two days working within the coalition on making sure that we have an agreed position. Perhaps I can say that one of the many areas in which this is not another Iraq is that we have been going through a very carefully constructed series of discussions and consultations within the Government. As the Opposition Front Bench will also know, there have been a series of discussions with the Opposition to try to make sure that everyone is as closely as involved as possible and that the information is exchanged as broadly as possible. Therefore, in all sorts of ways this is not Iraq 2.0.

This has been a take note debate, so of course the first thing I should say is that we will take note of the very many concerned and cautious speeches that we have heard in the course of the past few hours. The mood has been very sober and very concerned, although some noble Lords have perhaps not followed the newspapers as well as they might have. As I will come on to say later, the suggestion that we ought to try the diplomatic track appears to ignore the enormous efforts the Government have been putting in in recent months. As we have heard tonight, the shadow of Iraq falls over all our discussions.

I will stress one obvious thing. One or two noble Lords have talked about a unilateral operation. This would in no sense be a unilateral operation. Indeed, a number of other Governments have asked if they might be included in the operation, and the levels of support are large for some response to this clear breach of international law. The Arab League has condemned it and a number of other Governments have condemned it; the Turks have been very clear and the European Union has been very clear—this is not the sort of position in which we found ourselves in March 2003. We have a much broader coalition and much clearer evidence. Much of that evidence is open evidence. A lot more is in widespread diplomatic telegrams of not particularly high classification. The regime is thought to have used chemical weapons in much smaller quantities on somewhere between 10 and 14 previous occasions. On some of these, there appears to be sufficient evidence to report them to the United Nations.

What was different about this intervention was that it was on a much larger scale. As my noble friend the Leader of the House said in his opening speech, there were attacks on 11 different locations in the Damascus area. That is very hard to cover up. It also suggests that it is unlikely to have been an operation conducted by a junior officer on his own. It was clearly conducted by a large series of simultaneous operations, suggesting a senior command structure, and it was conducted in Damascus, close to the central command structure of the regime. Of course, it is possible that we may discover that President Assad was not previously informed, but this is not a rogue incident that happened in Aleppo, Homs or somewhere else; it happened in 11 different locations in Damascus. That suggests that we have much stronger evidence, not a dodgy dossier of the sort that one or two noble Lords have suggested that this might again be.

The noble Baroness, Lady Royall, asked what chemical was used. All the evidence we have suggests that it was diluted sarin, which is one of the many chemicals banned by the chemical weapons convention, but as she will know, the chemical weapons convention bans the use of all poisonous chemical agents in warfare or conflict of this sort.

There is compelling evidence, and more compelling evidence will be presented as the UN inspectors provide what will be a preliminary report. I again remind the House that the inspectors have not been asked to attribute responsibility; they were asked simply to confirm that chemical weapons have been used. The scale of this chemical weapons attack suggests something that is way beyond the capacity of the opposition to have conducted. The projectiles used were those that no one has any evidence that the opposition has access to, and the attacks were made on opposition-controlled areas. Therefore, the very strong probability is that this was an Assad-regime attack and that it was ordered by people relatively high up within the current regime.

On the legality, we have heard a number of very expert speeches, in particular that of the former Attorney-General, the noble and learned Lord, Lord Goldsmith, who rightly said that we have to include a large number of considerations, including that force should be used only as a last resort. That picks up what the most reverend Primate the Archbishop of Canterbury said about the just war doctrine. There are occasions when one has to use force, but one should be extremely cautious about how one approaches it. That is the approach that the Government are taking.

The noble Lord, Lord Lea of Crondall, suggested that perhaps chemical weapons were all over Syria and might therefore be in the hands of the opposition. We have seen no credible evidence or reporting that any terrorist group in Syria has acquired regime chemical weapons stocks.

[Lord Lea of Crondall]

Given their very wide spread, it is very likely that to control them in some way you would have to have boots on the ground.

[Lord Wallace of Saltaire]

So far as we know, the weapons are still well controlled by the regime, and one of our expectations is that if there are indications that the regime is losing control of them, the Russians as well as others will be very concerned about that loss of control.

A number of noble Lords have talked about punishment. I regret that one or two of our American allies have used the word “punishment”. The intention is deterrence, not punishment. The intention is a limited and proportionate response that will deter the regime from thinking that it can use chemical weapons again. The risk of inaction, about which my noble friend Lord Ashdown and the noble Lord, Lord Robertson, have also spoken is that if we do nothing the regime is likely to assume that it can use chemical weapons again, and in larger quantities if it wishes. The argument, therefore, for a limited, carefully calibrated and proportionate response is to say, “Thus far and no further”.

[Lord Elton]

My Lords, can the noble Lord help us? It would be very helpful if he said what sort of form this limited and proportionate intervention might take.

[Lord Wallace of Saltaire]

For very obvious reasons, I am not able to say that. I am privy only to some of the discussions that have taken place on this, but I can assure him that the intervention would not be aimed at command structures. Someone suggested that we want to take out the President himself or, indeed, that it would be aimed at chemical weapons stocks. For very obvious reasons—

[Lord Cormack]

How does my noble friend square the statement that we are not bent on regime change when the Government do not recognise the regime?

[Lord Wallace of Saltaire]

My Lords, in a limited operation you do not attempt to go for regime change. Perhaps I may go on to my next point. We are of course all concerned to learn the lessons of Iraq. Disastrously, our American allies dismantled the entire structure of the state and the armed forces when they went into Iraq. The reason why we are all attempting to achieve transition in Syria is that we maintain as much as we can of the current state and social structure. We are all aware that to allow the Assad regime to collapse altogether would be to risk chaos following. That is why we have been pursuing, through Geneva I and, we hope, the Geneva II conference, proposals for some form of agreed transition in which—with, we hope, the help of Russia and others—some members of the regime would be removed but which some of the officials within the current regime would help to manage. We are not, therefore, attempting to promote that sort of disastrous regime change.

[Baroness Royall of Blaisdon]

My Lords, I am somewhat confused because the noble Lord is talking about a strategic strike in which nothing would really happen to change regimes. Now he is talking about what the Government are trying to do to ensure a proper transition. The two things do not really go together and I am slightly alarmed as well as confused.

[Lord Wallace of Saltaire]

My Lords, there are of course unavoidable links between any military intervention and the much broader issue: how can we help to provide a secure and more stable future for Syria? However, moving on to the second diplomatic track, we have been engaged for the past year in attempting to promote a broader political transition in Syria. That was the purpose of the Geneva I conference and part of the purpose whereby we have been working with the Syrian National Council, now the Syrian national coalition, which would recognise—

[Lord Tebbit]

My Lords, first, can the Minister tell me, in the event of this strike in some form being made, and there is a repetition of the use of chemical weapons, what do we do then? Clearly the Government must have thought this through. Secondly, can he tell me when the Government in Damascus became the regime? Thirdly, can he explain a little more of what he has just said about the efforts that the Government have been making to achieve regime change? I had not understood that we were in the business of bringing down the regime and replacing it.

[Lord Wallace of Saltaire]

My Lords, there is a civil war in Syria. So far, 100,000 people have been killed and 2 million people are refugees outside Syria. The society and economy of Syria are in the process of being destroyed, which requires the international community to try to resolve the situation.

[Lord Winston]

My Lords, I thank the noble Lord for giving way. The whole House has great respect for him but I feel that he has rather missed the mood of the Chamber today. He says that 100,000 people have been killed already. Can he give us the Government’s estimate of how many more people might be killed if we engage in a strike against Syria?

[Lord Wallace of Saltaire]

My Lords, if we are engaged in a strike on Syria it will be limited and very deliberately targeted, and not intended to cause any significant number of casualties. We are attempting to deter further chemical attacks. We are also attempting to defend the principle of international law. Let me say to those who say that it does not matter how you are killed, by whatever weapons, there are differences. The international community and international law have outlawed weapons of mass destruction. Chemical weapons have been illegal internationally since 1925. That is a red line and if we do not support the principle that using chemical weapons either against your own people or against members of another state is different, we are simply allowing that major principle of international law to decay. That is the principle with which we are engaged. At the same time, we and others, including the Arab League, the World Muslim Council, the European Union, and many others are working to try to resolve the situation and the conflict in Syria.

I was amazed to hear from a number of people the question: why do we not pay more attention to the diplomatic channel? Why has the Geneva II conference not yet taken place? We had hoped that the second Geneva conference would take place this July, and the Russians did their best to delay it. We hoped then that it would take place in September; we now hope that it may take place in November. The level of diplomatic activity in which Her Majesty’s Government have been engaged in the past few months has been enormous. I was in the Foreign Office yesterday reading transcripts of conversations with heads of government, foreign secretaries and others from 20 or more different Governments, ranging from Japan, to Russia, to Australia and to the United Arab Emirates. We are actively working on the diplomatic track. Unfortunately, we have not found much support from our colleagues in Russia or very much support from the Chinese, although the Chinese Government have condemned officially the use of chemical weapons. The diplomatic track is our preferred option, and we are working on it. The use of force is a last resort to be used only if other methods break down.

[Lord Reid of Cardowan]

Before the Minister leaves the diplomatic issues, today’s debate is about Syria and the use of chemical weapons. I wonder whether the Minister can enlighten me. It seems to me that today the Government, when talking about Syria and the use of chemical weapons, have concentrated almost exclusively on the question of military force. When the Government have been talking about diplomatic means, they have talked about the transition from civil war to a new regime. Perhaps he can tell us a little more about the diplomatic measures that have been taken to address the question of chemical weapons, ratification, signature and mobilising the 189 countries, including Russia and Iran, which are liable to be more sympathetic to that issue than to regime change, into putting pressure on the regime. In short, what diplomatic measures are being taken to address the question of chemical weapons rather than regime change?

[Lord Wallace of Saltaire]

My Lords, we have also been discussing the chemical weapons question with the Russians. To my knowledge, as of late this afternoon they had not accepted that it was the Syrian Government who were responsible for the use of chemical weapons, so there are real problems there.

[Lord Reid of Cardowan]

Does that mean that the answer to my question is, “None”, and that, for whatever reason, there has been no diplomatic initiative—as suggested by the noble Baroness, Lady Williams, the noble Lord, Lord Jay, and me—around the Chemical Weapons Convention and the mobilisation of international opinion to put pressure on the Assad regime to address the question through diplomacy? If there has been, will the Minister tell us about it, as this debate is about chemical weapons rather than regime change?

[Lord Wallace of Saltaire]

My Lords, there has not been action within the Chemical Weapons Convention. As the noble Lord knows, Syria is not a member of the convention and we did not have the sense that the other members of the P5—the Russians and the Chinese—would support a move down the Chemical Weapons Convention road at this stage. However, I will take the noble Lord’s point back into the discussions that are continuing.

A number of noble Lords mentioned that there might be much to be gained by conversations with Iran. There are contacts with Iran, which helpfully condemned the use of chemical weapons. We all understand that the Iranians suffered very badly from these weapons in the past. However, the Iranian regime is very complex, and dealing with it is very difficult. It will take some time to make much progress in that direction.

I am conscious of the time. I will rapidly talk a little about our humanitarian response. I can confirm that the United Kingdom is providing very substantial humanitarian assistance as far as possible—although this is difficult—both to those displaced within Syria and to the very large number of refugees outside Syria. We expect to maintain and increase that further.

I was struck by the contributions of a number of noble Lords who talked about the growing scepticism about western leadership, and whether we now have to accept that others will help provide leadership in maintaining a stable and lawful international system. That is a much broader question than that of tonight’s debate. It suggests an interesting shift in elite British thinking, and I suspect that we will return to talking about the implications for British foreign policy in future.

[Lord Robertson of Port Ellen]

I wonder whether the Minister will enlighten the House. In the light of the fact that in the past few minutes the House of Commons has defeated the Government Motion, what is plan B?

[Lord Wallace of Saltaire]

My Lords, it is very kind of the noble Lord to ask me to respond three minutes after that happened. I am sure that plan B is to consider the situation. We will continue to discuss with a wide range of international partners the possibilities and implications of these circumstances.

To conclude—

[Lord Bilimoria]

The Minister started off by saying that this was not Iraq II. He then spoke about the 10 to 14 times that this had happened before. According to the report, it has happened exactly 14 times. The Minister then said that we do not know whether it was a senior or junior officer, and then that it could be, should be, possibly was or must have been a senior officer. The preliminary report talked of a strong possibility. Then came the phrase, “as far as we know”. We have heard from many noble Lords who spoke in the debate on Iraq 10 years ago, when there was a two to one majority against going into Iraq. The Government at the time did not listen. Now the majority is nine or more to one. Why did the Government want to rush in last week with all these uncertainties? That is what we find very difficult to understand.

[Lord Wallace of Saltaire]

My Lords, briefly, when a clear breach of international law has taken place, there is a very delicate calculation about how rapidly you respond or how long you should wait until the evidence is entirely clear. If you wait too long, it becomes impossible to respond. Of course you do not rush in immediately, but you should, as we have done, at least indicate rapidly that you intend to respond and that you do not intend to let it pass unnoticed.

[Baroness Royall of Blaisdon]

My Lords, forgive me; I know that the Minister wishes to wind up and it is somewhat unfair to put him on the spot. However, to follow up the question from my noble friend Lord Robertson, I realise that the government Motion has only very recently been defeated but I would hope that the Government already had a plan B in mind when they took the substantive Motion to the Commons this afternoon. It is clear that at some point in the very near future the Government will have to come back to the House of Commons to explain what action if any they will now advise to the House of Commons. I therefore ask the Minister and the Leader of the House this: in the vacuum that seems to exist at the moment and the great concern that has been expressed this afternoon, I would hope that when the Prime Minister comes back to the House of Commons to report on his future action, this House also will be recalled so that we, too, can debate the future action.

[Lord Wallace of Saltaire]

I note the noble Baroness’s request. Perhaps I may say that, as I understand it, both the amendment and the Motion were defeated in the Commons, so we are now perhaps in a state of consensual confusion on this across the parties.

We have before us a range of very serious issues. First, international law and international convention have clearly been broken. Secondly, we have active consultation with a range of Governments around the world about how we contain the increasingly bitter Syrian conflict. I know that my colleagues the Ministers have been discussing with a range of other Governments, including the Russians and the members of the Arab League, how we might now convene the Geneva II conference. It is certainly my hope that we will manage to reconvene the Geneva II conference as soon as possible.

That takes us to the broader issue of the future of the Middle East as a whole and our relations with the Muslim world, a subject that one or two noble Lords have touched on. That is a very broad subject, which we have discussed in this House on one or two occasions this year. We all need to pay very considerable—

[Lord Tebbit]

Before my noble friend sits down, let me say that I think that it is rather unfair to ask him about what the Government are going to do in consequence of the votes in the other place this evening. However, I think that it was also rather unfair of him not to tell me whether there was a plan for what to do if we did take military action and there was another incident of the use of chemical weapons. Is there a plan for that? Is he privy to it, even if he cannot tell us what it is?

[Lord Wallace of Saltaire]

My Lords, I am not privy to the full military plans of the Government, but if I were I would not be able to tell him on the Floor of the House. What I can tell him is that inaction also has consequences. We are talking in particular to the Russian Government, who appear to be concerned as the scale of this chemical weapons attack becomes clearer. We hope that the diplomatic track may become easier as the seriousness of what happened in Damascus on 21 August becomes clearer to a range of other Governments. In all of these the use of force itself is—and I end on this—a last resort. Our preference is always for the diplomatic track. However, we have to bear in mind that international law and international conventions are to be observed and supported.

[Baroness Royall of Blaisdon]

Forgive me, but I have just been informed by my noble friends that the Prime Minister has in fact reacted in the House of Commons to the defeat of both the government Motion and the amendment laid by my right honourable friend the leader of the Opposition. As we are sitting, I wonder if it might be apposite to call for us to adjourn at pleasure, just for 10 minutes, so that perhaps the Minister or the Leader could report on what the Prime Minister has said in the other place.

[Lord Goldsmith]

My Lords, perhaps I may press the noble Baroness a little further. I understand that today the State Department said that it was not concerned or would not be deterred in any way in deciding what it was going to do by what this Parliament decided. The consequence of that may well be, therefore, that the United States may take action quite soon. Indeed, there were suggestions that that might happen this weekend. For that reason, and because the House has been recalled—it is more of an emergency for this House because it was not due to sit next week—it would be enormously helpful to know what might happen next and what involvement this House might have in it. That is why I would certainly support the suggestion of my noble friend for at least a short adjournment to see whether there is a plan B and whether the government Front Bench can advise the House on what that plan B is.

[Lord Wallace of Saltaire]

Asking us to provide a full sketch of a plan B at 23.00 on a Thursday night is not possible. I am of course not privy to what the Americans may or may not be planning. We all take what is being said on the opposition Benches under consideration, but at the moment we cannot predict what will happen over the next few days.

[Lord Ashdown of Norton-sub-Hamdon]

My Lords, I have no wish to make life more difficult for the Government when they are already in a rather difficult position, but I really do think that, given the wisdom we have heard from both the noble Baroness the Leader of the Opposition and from other speakers, it might be worth while for this House to take a 10-minute break. If there is no news to deliver, that is fine, but a 10-minute break is a sacrifice we could make to our sleep if it would give us some clarification on what should come next. I find it quite difficult to believe that we cannot find some news to deliver to the House in that time.

European Union Committee: 2012-13 (EUC Report)

Lord Wallace of Saltaire Excerpts

Tuesday 30th July 2013 Lords Chamber

[Lord Wallace of Saltaire]

My Lords, I am conscious that I now stand between noble Lords and what the noble Baroness, Lady O’Cathain, called their buckets and spades, although in my case it is my punnet and hoe. I failed to pick rather too many of our raspberries and a large quantity of our blackcurrants last weekend, so I look forward to getting back as soon as possible to provide my wife with them to process.

I declare an interest as a former member of the House of Lords EU Committee and a former chair of one of one of its sub-committees. I had thought that perhaps when I step down from government, it would be very pleasant to sit on the committee again. However, what I have heard today suggests that it is all extremely hard work, which is the last thing my wife would want me to do when I have finished working absurdly hard in government. We appreciate how much extremely valuable work the Lords EU Committee and its sub-committees do. The Government certainly have no intention to reduce the number of sub-committees. I remind Members that the number of sub-committees and the allocation of committee resources in this House is a matter for this House and its authorities, not for the Government.

The committee will have seen the Government’s written response to this report and the Minister for Europe welcomed it.

[Lord Davies of Stamford]

On the very important point of the allocation of resources to permit the committees to do their work, we have, of course, recently been subject to reductions in our travel budget. That is bizarre, because the work requires us to keep in close touch with our continental partners and in particular with the institutions in Brussels. Do the Government have a view on the matter of the resources that should be allocated or the reduction in resources that is being imposed on the committees here?

[Lord Wallace of Saltaire]

My Lords, I am simply not briefed on that. However, I can assure the noble Lord that as a Minister I travel with Ryanair and easyJet to various places around the outer fringes of the European Union. We also do our best to economise where we can. I remind the noble Lord that this is the leanest Government that Britain has had for many years because we have cut the government car pool very substantially—we have to walk everywhere.

This is a very timely debate. I recall our previous debate on the annual report, which took place rather later than this one, and in the Moses Room, although we are now here in the Chamber. I also recall it because the noble Baroness, Lady O’Cathain, criticised me very sharply on that occasion for not having read every single report that the committee had produced in the previous year. I can assure her that I have read at least the summary of every report that the committee has produced this year.

There are, of course, many examples of the way in which the committee has fed into the Brussels process and the work of other Governments, as well into the debate within Britain. We are concerned at the criticisms that the committee has made of the untimely provision of Explanatory Memoranda, and in particular of the role of the Treasury. We very much take on board what the noble Lord, Lord Kerr, said about the importance of timeliness in terms of subsidiarity. I will take all the points back, and we will discuss them in the Cabinet Office, the Foreign Office and various parliamentary branches of the relevant departments, to make sure that they are fully taken on board. I am an enthusiast for the development of the use of the yellow card mechanism. We have to make sure that we are given all the resources we can manage so that we will be able to use that to its best ability.

I have been heavily involved in the balance of competences review for six months, about which various comments have been made. Perhaps I may stress that those reports were not intended to have policy recommendations at the end. They were intended very much to feed into a better informed debate in the United Kingdom. I hope that the first six reports have done so. I look forward—although perhaps not entirely—to three more rounds of very careful assimilation of a large amount of evidence presented into another collection of reports.

I say to the noble Lord, Lord Hannay, that the balance of competences exercise is very much in parallel to other aspects of what is going on in government. We have welcomed his committee’s report on the justice and home affairs opt-out. The balance of competences exercise is proceeding in parallel with a whole range of other negotiations and the order of reports was drawn up some time ago, with other dimensions in mind.

We are attempting, both within the balance of competences exercise and in the work of this and other committees, to provide space for a reasoned debate within the European Union about our interaction with the European Union. We all recognise that over the next nine to 12 months that debate may be constricted in some ways as we move towards the next European elections. We are also conscious, particularly so over the past week, that the press is not always favourable to a reasoned debate. The Leveson report remarked that in press coverage of the European Union—as with press comment on women, minorities and Muslims—its attitude is that it is quite acceptable to invent stories without any source whatever.

I was very struck to see this story in the Mail the other day:

“Revealed: The shadowy lobbyists waging war to keep Britain in Europe”,

I read it with great interest, only to discover that it was actually talking about British Influence, which is an entirely public body. I think that the Mail had lifted this story from a Eurosceptic blog, which said that British Influence was a deeply dangerous organisation funded by the secretive Bilderberg Group. Oddly enough, the Mail did not include that bit.

I was also quite worried by the article by Peter Oborne in the Telegraph last week, saying that:

“The 1975 referendum was a fair poll in the same sense that the elections due to be held in Zimbabwe next Wednesday will be fair … The sense has lingered that we were hustled, against our will, by an anti-democratic elite, into an organisation whose true aims and nature were hidden from us until too late”.

The BBC, of course, was playing a role in the deceitful agenda.

On Saturday, the Telegraph’s Brussels correspondent, Bruno Waterfield, told us that,

“the European Union is planning to ‘own and operate’ spy drones, surveillance satellites and aircraft”,

under the control of the noble Baroness, Lady Ashton, in,

“a major move towards creating an independent EU military body with its own equipment and operations”.

I was therefore very pleased to receive this morning an invitation from King’s College London to a debate in October on how to ensure that we have impartial reporting on the European Union, at which Bruno Waterfield will be one of the speakers.

I say this partly to demonstrate that getting reasoned debate based on evidence about Britain’s involvement in the European Union is not easy and that this committee plays an immensely valuable role in helping to widen that debate. I hope that noble Lords have read the balance of competences review papers so far and I hope that they feel that they have drawn in evidence-based policy with which perhaps to counter the emotion-based policy, the prejudice-based policy and the conspiracy-oriented allegations which so often cloud out rational debate in Britain. All parties must contribute to this effort.

I say to the noble Lord, Lord Judd, that I very much look forward to hearing a speech from the Labour leadership comparable to the speech made by the Prime Minister in January. The leader of my party, the Deputy Prime Minister, will make a major speech on the European Union in October. I very much hope that we will hear a constructive Labour contribution to an EU reform agenda that keeps Britain in the European Union. This is what the Prime Minister was talking about, and I confirm to the noble Lord, Lord Liddle, that that is what the coalition Government are pursuing, rather than unilateral repatriation intended to lead to an exit, which is what the Telegraph, the Mail and a number of others on the fringes of conventional politics very much want us to pursue.

I turn to various issues that were raised in the debate. The sub-committee on foreign affairs produced a very valuable report on common security and defence policy. I have noted that on scrutiny we have shifted very often from major reports to follow-on reports and continued scrutiny. As we approach the December European Council, which will have European defence very much on its agenda, I trust that the sub-committee will continue to monitor the way in which the British Government and others approach this. As everyone knows, there is a tension between those who are interested in institution building and others who are interested in practical conflict prevention and conflict resolution under that dossier.

Similarly, on banking union, it would be immensely valuable if the sub-committee responsible for that continues to monitor the ongoing debate. Having read its report and various other—mainly German—documents, I think that I understand the various different definitions of banking union that are floating around. However, because there are so many different definitions of banking union—with maximum, minimum et cetera—clearly we need to contribute to the debate. As the noble Lord, Lord Harrison, and others rightly said, we need to think also about where in the debate the interests of Britain and of Britain’s financial centres are at stake.

On the workload of the European Court of Justice, I take on board what has been said. We have now moved on the question of—

[Lord Kerr of Kinlochard]

Advocates-General.

[Lord Wallace of Saltaire]

Advocates-General. The question of more judges is now about to come up.

On the question of students and migration, I will write to the noble Lord, Lord Hannay. However, I will say now that the government line is that students who stay here for three to four years are not necessarily temporary visitors. That is one reason why the question of what role they play in the statistics is important. As the father of a student who went to the United States seven years ago and who I hope will come back to the United Kingdom one day, I am very conscious of the tensions.

[Lord Hannay of Chiswick]

I would like to save the Minister from sending an unnecessary letter in the Recess. This is not about statistics. I have said it an awful lot of times. Others, including the noble Lord, Lord MacGregor, in the debate that he initiated, also said it. It is about government policy and the impact of that policy on immigration and on our higher education sector. That was what the senior member of his party who is a member of the Cabinet referred to. I ask him to send me a letter not about statistics but about how the Government will give effect to the international education strategy that was put out by David Willetts yesterday and which, I am afraid, is not totally consistent with the Government’s immigration policy.

[Lord Wallace of Saltaire]

My Lords, I guarantee that I will look at the strategy of the Minister for higher education and will consult further.

The noble Lord, Lord Bowness, asked about a Eurojust opt-in. The Government are now consulting on the new Eurojust proposal, which was published on 17 July as part of a package, alongside a proposal for a European public prosecutor’s office. We have been clear that the UK will not participate in the establishment of a European public prosecutor’s office, so we are now considering how to respond to that.

One thing that I hope the committee will focus on in the coming year is the area of European data protection. This applies to domestic legislation in Britain—we may have a data-sharing Bill in the next Session—and applies also at European level. When it comes to negotiation with the United States, data protection and data-sharing are becoming—as we all know and see from the German elections—a highly sensitive area in which the expertise and expert contribution of the Lords European Union Committee could be extremely valuable. A number of noble Lords have talked about democratic accountability—

[Lord Hannay of Chiswick]

My Lords, I am sorry to interrupt again, but I have to tell the noble Lord that the Select Committee did, in fact, recommend that the Government opt in to the data protection directive currently under negotiation in Brussels. Mirabile dictum, the Government did opt in.

[Lord Wallace of Saltaire]

My Lords, the final shape of the data protection directive is by no means clear. We are a very long way from a final text. I merely wish to insist that it needs to be kept very well under review.

I move on to democratic accountability. The role of national parliaments and closer co-operation among national parliaments, of the sort that the noble Lord, Lord Kerr, and others talked about, is very much a direction in which we should be moving. The yellow card mechanism is developing. I do not agree with the noble Lord, Lord Howell, that it is not a workable mechanism. Closer co-operation between national parliaments; better use of the Brussels office, which we have and share with others; rapid provision of Explanatory Memorandums; and, as the noble Lord, Lord Kerr, also said, closer co-operation with British Members of the European Parliament should help us demonstrate to our publics that we are actively engaged in scrutinising the necessary involvement of the United Kingdom in a whole range of regulations at the European level, but also to make sure that we are feeding into the Brussels bubble the active concerns about subsidiarity that we and many other publics have.

This has been a very wide debate, and I simply want to end by pointing out that Her Majesty’s Government are committed to staying within a reformed European Union. We are working with others to promote that agenda. I was very pleased yesterday to read from the Foreign Office a number of telegrams about the positive reaction of other member Governments to the first balance of competences papers. We are already talking to a number of other Governments about how we might share an agenda for reform. That, I hope, has the support of all members of party and non-party groups in this House. I very much look forward to the further valuable contributions that the European Union Committee of this House will continue to make. I will do my utmost within government to ensure that members of the Government—even the Treasury—co-operate as fully and as promptly as possible with the continuing of the committee.

English Premier League Football

Lord Wallace of Saltaire Excerpts

Thursday 25th July 2013 Lords Chamber

[Lord Wallace of Saltaire]

My Lords, I remind the noble Lord that this is a time-limited debate.

[Lord Pendry]

I will conclude by congratulating the noble Lord, Lord Bates, once more. I look forward to hearing the contributions of others to this debate. I hope that all noble Lords who take part will learn something, as I will, from the contributions.

Local Audit and Accountability Bill [HL]

Lord Wallace of Saltaire Excerpts

Wednesday 24th July 2013 Lords Chamber

I am not sure whether the noble Lord or the noble Baroness will be the Minister replying—it will be the noble Lord shouldering this burden manfully as he replies to the debate. I hope that he can give some assurances of the kind suggested by my noble friend. I cannot see that the Government would emerge with anything but credit for accepting the amendment in the interests of transparency, in the interests of proper scrutiny of what happens, and ultimately of procuring value for money and saving money for the public purse.

[Lord Wallace of Saltaire]

My Lords, I start by thanking the noble Lord, Lord Wills, for our useful discussions about Amendments 1 and 2, both after Committee and again earlier this week. I also acknowledge his commitment to this agenda and the enthusiasm with which he pursues it.

Amendment 1 seeks to give auditors a right to access audit documents of significant contractors to local authorities and to make these available on request. Amendment 2 is concerned with extending freedom of information rules. The debate we have just had has extended over both amendments and, to some extent, I have to answer both amendments, even though the noble Lord chose to separate the two last night.

I acknowledge that there is a wider issue here, as the noble Lord, Lord Beecham, has just said, about the appropriate levels of audit, transparency and accountability for private providers of public services—whether they be for-profit companies, not-for-profit voluntary organisations or others. This issue has grown over the past 25 to 30 years as successive Governments of all parties have outsourced public services, both from the national and from the local level. As the noble Lord, Lord Beecham, pointed out, recent publicity over inadequate performance has heightened public interest and interest in this House, although I should note that almost all the recent cases publicised have been about nationally negotiated contracts, not local contracts. Noble Lords may have noticed that the Atos contract with DWP on work disability assessment included provision for DWP audit. That has now discovered certain weaknesses for which Atos has apologised.

I encourage the noble Lord to pursue this issue further. I will repeat what I said on Report: both Parliament and the Government need to look at this issue in general. With my Cabinet Office hat on I would say that the Cabinet Office is actively looking at the issues of commissioning and contracts and how to make sure that we are raising standards across Whitehall. The new Commissioning Academy, the Government’s champion for the non-profit sector, is part of how we are working at learning from mistakes that have been made, both under this Government and under our predecessor, and raising the level of approach. It would be highly appropriate for Parliament to look at this in parallel with the Government. As I suggested on Report, I encourage the noble Lord, Lord Wills, to consider whether he should bid for a sessional committee, for example, which would examine the changing relationship between non-governmental providers of public services and local authorities and national authorities to see whether we can find consensus across the parties on how we approach this issue.

On the wider issue, nevertheless, I have to say that the case has to be made. I suspect that the noble Lord, Lord Wills, was, in his commitment to greater transparency and freedom of information, in a minority in the previous Government. I recall that the Prime Minister Tony Blair said that the Freedom of Information Act was the biggest mistake that they had made. I share, as do all those in my party, a commitment to transparency in government, and the coalition Government have done their best to extend transparency. In many ways, however, there is rather further to go, particularly when one comes to the relations between the private sector and the public sector—the private for-profit sector, which pleads commercial sensitivity and additional costs from the extension of the sort of transparency and audit which the noble Lord is approving.

This specific amendment is not necessary because the Bill already gives these powers to local auditors. Clause 21 enables local auditors to access whatever documents and information they think are necessary to undertake their functions under the Bill. That includes documents held by local authorities’ contractors if the auditors consider that these are necessary in order to undertake their functions. That covers all the functions in the Bill, not just the audit of the financial statement but all the additional functions that are unique to local public audit such as the consideration of questions and objections from the local electorate and the issue of public interest reports. Schedule 11 to the Bill also includes provisions which enable local auditors to disclose information necessary to answer those questions and objections. The Government’s code of recommended practice for local authorities on data transparency recommends a minimum set of data to be published locally. All local authorities now publish expenditure over £500 and many publish their contracts. No audit firms have yet indicated that the current access rights are inadequate or lacking.

That being the case, I argue—I hope the noble Lord recognises that I do not argue the resistance to his amendment primarily on cost grounds—that the case is not made on this amendment. We all recognise that there is a wider issue about the overall transformation over the past 25 years of the relationship between government as provider of funds and the private, profit and non-profit sectors as the provider of those services in return for funds. However, I agree strongly with my noble friend Lord Palmer of Childs Hill, who said that much of this is covered in the contractual relationship. We are all learning about how to improve that contractual relationship. The Government, particularly within the Cabinet Office, are working on how to extend best practice across the Government nationally as well as assisting local authorities. Having given all of those assurances, I hope that the noble Lord feels able to withdraw his amendment on the condition that we will continue to discuss and examine this very broad issue.

[Lord Wills]

My Lords, this has been a short but useful debate. I am grateful to all who have spoken in it and for the fact that everyone—except the Minister—has broadly supported the amendment. I congratulate the two new vice-presidents of the Local Government Association on their contribution on this subject. I am also grateful to the Minister and the noble Baroness, Lady Hanham, and their officials for their willingness to engage continually with me on this subject. I have benefited from our discussions.

I am grateful, too, that the Minister expressed his continuing willingness for the Government to keep looking at this issue. That is a step forward from the Committee stage and the Report stage. Although the Government have not accepted the amendment, I am grateful for what I take to be a slow, almost imperceptible, warming of their position on it. However, looking at this issue is not the same as doing something about it. It is not the same as taking advantage of what is likely to be quite a rare legislative opportunity to bring greater transparency to this important sphere of public life.

The Minister mentioned two primary reasons for resisting the amendment. One was commercial sensitivity. However, he will be well aware that the Freedom of Information Act 2000 has an exemption for commercial sensitivity—subject, of course, to a public interest test. So, with all respect to him, I am not sure how far he would wish to pursue that argument.

The Minister then focused on the idea that the amendment is not necessary. Both he and the noble Lord, Lord Palmer of Childs Hill, relied for their position on the fact that good local authorities should have this aspect covered anyway in their contractual relationships with private sector companies providing outsourced work. The noble Lords are, of course, right. Good local authorities should have this covered. If all local authorities were good local authorities, my amendment would not be necessary. But they are not. They make mistakes and they overlook things, as we all do. In Committee I gave examples. I notice that the noble Lord, Lord Palmer of Childs Hill, did not say that all local authorities do this. He said, quite rightly, shame on those that do not, but he conceded that there are those that do not. I think that the Minister himself said that “much” of this—not all of it—was covered under the contractual arrangements. That is precisely what the amendment seeks to remedy. It seeks to ensure that all local authorities bring greater transparency to this crucial area of public life, where billions of pounds of taxpayers’ money are at stake. We have seen already how necessary this is.

In the light of that, I am afraid that I shall have to resist the Minister’s invitation to withdraw the amendment. Because the Government are warming to this idea, I hope that this House can send a signal to the other place about the importance of transparency and perhaps encourage the Government, when the Bill gets there, to move further on this issue. I therefore beg to test the opinion of the House.

--- Later in debate ---

[Lord Beecham]

My Lords, my noble friend is absolutely right to point out that this is simply a question of preserving, or perhaps reviving, the level terms on which freedom of information has hitherto applied. It is different from the previous case that we debated. No question of cost is likely to be germane to the amendment. It is simply there to ensure that the transparency currently available within a local authority’s documentation is extended to those with which it contracts, subject to the Freedom of Information Act provisions and exemptions. There seems to be an unanswerable case for ensuring that that degree of transparency will apply as it applies now, before the Bill is enacted. I concur with my noble friend who urges on the Government acceptance of this provision, which is different from the previous amendment and to which I can see no possible objection, even from Liberal Democrat Members of your Lordships’ House or, indeed, elsewhere.

[Lord Wallace of Saltaire]

My Lords, the Government are keen to promote transparency. As I have previously suggested, they are sometimes keener than their predecessors were to promote transparency and accountability around outsourced services. However, we agree with the Justice Select Committee’s recommendations in its post-legislative scrutiny of the Freedom of Information Act and consider that the better approach is to preserve transparency through contractual provisions, rather than the formal extension of the Freedom of Information Act at this time. In 2012 the Justice Select Committee considered in detail during its post-legislative scrutiny the challenge of how to deal with contractors of public authorities. The committee concluded that,

“contracts provide a more practical basis for applying FOI to outsourced services than partial designation of commercial companies under section 5 of the Act”.

--- Later in debate ---

[Lord Beecham]

If it is the Government’s intention to see how the system works and then possibly take further steps, why do they not accept the amendment on the basis that it will incorporate in another place a sunrise clause, giving it the opportunity to proceed without primary legislation, which would otherwise be involved?

[Lord Wallace of Saltaire]

My Lords, this Government, unlike their predecessors, are concerned to minimise the number of burdens on business, contractors and on the voluntary sector. After all, we are dealing with a large number of non-profits. We want to see whether the system works before adding more regulation.

Let me end by reiterating that increasing transparency is important but we do not see that the amendment moved by the noble Lord, Lord Wills, provides the right approach at the current time to the problems that we face. Local people already have the right to ask questions and raise issues with the auditors, and the Government are committed to keeping under review the current approach to encourage local authorities and contractors to interpret their obligations more broadly and, if necessary, consider other approaches.

[Lord Wills]

My Lords, I am grateful to my noble friend on the Front Bench and to the Minister for his response, but I am baffled by it. He has not argued on the fact that it is a decrease in transparency, does not maintain the status quo and does not provide citizens with the right to know, in the way of the old regime. Yet the Minister wants time for this decrease in transparency to bed in.

[Lord Wallace of Saltaire]

My Lords, I do not accept the noble Lord’s contention that it is a decrease in transparency. As I remarked on the Atos cases, on which there has been some publicity, the way in which contracts are now being formulated provides for a considerable expansion in transparency in how they are negotiated, and with access to the public authority as contractor. We simply do not accept what the noble Lord is arguing.

[Lord Wills]

I am grateful for the Minister’s intervention but he has still not answered the question. It is clear that the Minister cannot guarantee—I will sit down if he can do so—that all local authorities will formulate their contracts with private sector contractors in a way that guarantees the transparency that he says he wants. I am happy to sit down if he can guarantee that. The Minister is not moving in his seat. Of course, he cannot guarantee it.

[Lord Wallace of Saltaire]

There is a difference of philosophical approach between the two parties and the current position of the Labour Party. The Labour Party is rather more centralist and authoritarian and wishes to tie everything up together. We are trying to provide more flexibility and more autonomy. That is why we are attempting this slightly less centralised and over-regulatory approach.

[Lord Wills]

I agree that there is a difference between the two sides on this. However, it is not about authoritarianism but about whether we trust a bunch of politicians or the citizen with the right to transparency. The whole point of freedom of information is that it gives the citizen the right. The Minister wants to give private sectors and politicians the chance to stitch it up between them without giving the citizen the right to scrutinise it. That is the difference between the two parties. It has nothing to do with authoritarianism.

However, the Minister has still not addressed the point that this is a decrease in transparency. He has not said, for example, how the coalition will decide, when it reviews the arrangements that the Bill will bring in, whether transparency needs to be increased. By its definition it will be almost impossible for the coalition to find out and I am curious about how the review will be conducted.

The Minister focused his remarks on the relationship with the private sector but the amendment covers not only that relationship but local district auditors. That is the key point. The citizen and the taxpayer need transparency in the operation of the people who scrutinise the delivery of public services. I remind the Minister that the Grant Thornton report on Mid Staffs showed how important it is that there should be transparency in the work of those who monitor and scrutinise the delivery of public services. The Government say that they have learnt the lesson from Mid Staffs but the Minister, whatever he says, has just proved that they still have not learnt the lessons about the merits of transparency.

However, I notice the Minister’s careful words. He said that “at this time”, “at this stage”, he is reserving his options. It may be that between now and the Bill going to the other place the Government will change their mind and it will not be “at this time” any more but “at another time”. With that and the disappointingly unsatisfactory response from the Minister in mind, and in the hope that your Lordships’ House will send a signal to the other place, I ask leave to test the opinion of the House.