King’s Speech

Lord Warner Excerpts

Tuesday 23rd July 2024 Lords Chamber

[Lord Warner (CB) (Valedictory Speech)]

My Lords, let me first compliment our new Attorney-General on his excellent maiden speech. I very much welcome his commitment to the rule of law, internationally and nationally, but I am afraid it is hello and goodbye because after 26 years here—and being nearly 84— I have decided that enough is enough. That may be a blessing of relief for many people in this House.

I am not going because of the Labour Party’s commitment to downsizing the House of Lords. I am going because I support that, but it is too timid and not strong enough. What I would like to see is a statutory cap, as others have said, of 500 or 600 Peers with fixed terms of 10 to 15 years, alongside retirement at 80 and together with restrictions on prime ministerial appointments. If we have the courage to do that, we will seriously get to grips with a permanent control over the volume of people in this House.

I also want to emphasise my commitment to the idea of removing the Bishops. They are as much an anomaly as hereditary Peers, and the noble and learned Lord, Lord Keen, has done us a service in seeming to support that view that they should join the hereditary Peers at the exit. We are a secular society, as censuses and the British Social Attitudes surveys have shown for some time. Anglican Church attendance is shrinking faster than the volume of letters delivered by the Royal Mail, while its congregations largely consist of people over 60. Apart from theocracies such as Iran, there are no other Parliaments where clerics have a right of representation, so that is my starter for 10.

I also strongly support the Government’s commitment to greater devolution. Throughout my working life the governance of England has been overcentralised, with Ministers taking too many powers of direction and senior civil servants—some of whom are here and may disagree—enjoying command and control, undeterred by the short-termism that command and control has seemed to attract in the behaviour of government departments. The Government need to have the courage to start tackling some of those problems. The considerable devolution of powers to Scotland, Wales and Northern Ireland has failed to be extended to English regions over a long period of time, apart from a few city mayors.

Take a slightly unglamorous region, if I may put it that way, such as Yorkshire and Humberside—

[Noble Lords]

Oh!

[Lord Warner (CB)]

I thought noble Lords needed waking up at this time of night. I will say something nice about it. A region such as Yorkshire and Humberside has a bigger population than Scotland and nearly twice the population of Wales, but its public services are largely controlled from London. It is very easy to say we want more devolution, but you have to have some of the detail to make it happen. For devolution to work, the Government need to move to multiyear budgets, remove all these silly local biddings for small pockets of money and use flexible population-weighted financial allocations for many more local services.

This cannot be achieved without a major overhaul of the council tax system—this is absolutely essential. That system is simply not fit for purpose, given the statutory duties and powers that local government has had laid on it by this Parliament. We have to be honest with people that that system is bust—it is broken and needs to be replaced. Nowhere is devolution more urgently required than our broken NHS. I do not have time to go into this, but it is essential that we use devolution there to move the money away from often failing acute hospitals.

I am sorry I am leaving before we have legislation allowing assisted dying and protecting children from illegal religious schools. As the new Attorney-General has said, there are some issues about whether the Government will take seriously the new ICJ ruling on Israel’s conduct in the Occupied Territories. I hope the new Attorney-General will pay attention to that and get the Government to take seriously some of the concerns in this area.

However, I have been around politics a long time, and I am a bit like Mick Jagger, who has been singing for 60 years, “You can’t always get what you want”. That’s it. The end.