UK-EU Withdrawal Agreement
Lord Whitty Excerpts(3 years, 11 months ago)
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Lord True (Con)
My Lords, I will not go into the specifics of negotiations with India, although I know the noble Lord has a particular interest and I respect and understand that. The objective of Her Majesty’s Government is to extend free trade agreements as widely as we may, because we believe free trade is one of the greatest sources of the uplifting of poverty and the human condition that has ever been devised. I welcome the recent announcement of a further free trade agreement, with Singapore.
Lord Whitty (Lab) [V]
My Lords, the problems for Northern Ireland business are not solely those relating to the ports. For example, on Tuesday we debated an SI amending the REACH arrangements for the use of chemicals. It is clear that businesses both operating in and supplying Northern Ireland will have to engage in a dual process of registration in both the European and British systems. The arrangements announced today do nothing to ameliorate that. What help will the Government give to users of chemicals in Northern Ireland, and indeed in other regimes that require a duality of approach and therefore administrative costs to Northern Irish businesses?
Lord True (Con)
My Lords, the movement of chemicals brings particular complexities, as the noble Lord rightly points out, but the Government are committing an enormous amount of resource to the support of Northern Ireland businesses in terms of the movement of goods. That had already been announced. Indeed, I was criticised by the noble Baroness opposite for the scale of support the Government are giving to Northern Ireland and to business generally in confronting the new regime.
EU Exit: End of Transition Period
Lord Whitty Excerpts(4 years, 2 months ago)
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Lord True (Con)
My Lords, I do not believe that this Government have a jingoistic attitude or one of superiority towards our French partners or any others. My belief, and that of most people who know both nations and the member states on either end of the main transport routes, is that no one would see an interest in unnecessary disruption. What is before your Lordships is a reasonable worst-case scenario. It should not be taken as a prediction. I hope that over the next few months, people reflecting on these matters ensure that we come nowhere near such a scenario.
Lord Whitty (Lab) [V]
My Lords, the Minister said that this was a reasonable worst case. But, given the statements by the Freight Transport Association and the Road Haulage Association, neither of which believe that this system will be in place by January, is it not in fact closer to the most likely outcome, and do the Government not need to find a contingency arrangement that avoids the worst of this scenario?
Lord True (Con)
No, my Lords. We believe that the systems we are putting in place provide the best guarantee that we will avoid the worst case. I cannot promise that there will be no friction, but I do not accept the characterisation of the recent meetings between the Government and the Road Haulage Association. I believe that those meetings have been constructive. As I said, we have provided more than £80 million in funding to support customs intermediaries, and the measures that I have spoken of today will assist more road hauliers to become ready. The Government are not criticising anybody; they seek partnership, and I do not believe that throwing stones on either side of this constructive discussion helps.
EU: Non-financial Services
Lord Whitty Excerpts(4 years, 2 months ago)
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Lord True (Con)
My Lords, I am not quite as adept as my noble friend, but I try never to bring too much despondency to the House. The Government’s position is that we still very much hope that we will get a fruitful and excellent agreement, but my noble friend is right to say that major difficulties remain and that the EU’s insistence on progress on state aid and fisheries is an obstacle to making progress overall.
Lord Whitty (Lab) [V]
My Lords, nearly three years ago I chaired an inquiry into non-financial services. As far as I can see, and from what the Minister says, virtually none of the concerns of those sectors has yet resulted in an actual agreement, even in draft. It would of course be helpful if the Minister could undertake to get his department to reply to each of the recommendations in that report but, for today, perhaps he could respond on just two sectors. On the creative industries—music, film, broadcasting and theatre in particular—what progress has been made for reciprocal provisions on intellectual property, free movement, particularly mode 4, and even such basic things as transportation of musical instruments and theatrical scenery, for example? On transport, specifically aviation—I declare my vice-presidency of BALPA in the first sector—and road haulage, aside from any short-term contingency provisions—
Lord Whitty (Lab)
Progress has to be made on obtaining long-term reciprocal EU-UK arrangements for those sectors.
The Lord Speaker (Lord Fowler)
Before the Minister replies, I remind Members that we have now gone for four and a half minutes and have had only two questions. If people could keep their questions short, it would be much appreciated by the House.
National Risk Register
Lord Whitty Excerpts(4 years, 5 months ago)
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Lord True
My Lords, the noble and gallant Lord makes an important point. In responding to threats since 2016, we have drawn lessons about the involvement of the Armed Forces, as well as volunteers. I pay tribute to the extraordinary role of the Armed Forces in the current crisis and agree with much of what he said.
Lord Whitty (Lab)
My Lords, given that the outbreak of a pandemic has been top of the risk register since 2009, do we need not just a list of the mitigation required but the means to deliver that mitigation? We know that there were no standby contracts for the production of PPE or stockpiles of it. We also know that laboratories in the public, private and university sector had not been contacted to establish potential testing facilities. This would apply whatever the nature of the disease. From here on, will those contracts be put in place for any future pandemic?
European Union: Negotiations (European Union Committee Report)
Lord Whitty Excerpts(4 years, 8 months ago)
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Lord Whitty (Lab)
My Lords, I thank the noble Earl, Lord Kinnoull, and his committee for producing this report. It is very timely and clear. I will be supporting my noble friend Lady Hayter’s amendment and I thank her for tabling it. I will say something towards the end of my remarks about the whole issue of accountability.
I also thank the noble Lord, Lord Kerr, even though he has largely pre-empted some of my more important points. Like him—and the committee, rather more delicately—I regret that there has been a departure from the spirit of the political declaration. There has been a bit of a departure by the EU, one has to say, but a very substantial departure by the British Government from a political declaration that was, after all, signed by this Prime Minister. That is serious enough but, as the noble Lord, Lord Kerr, has just said, even more serious is the apparent departure from what is already in a signed treaty in relation to Northern Ireland and the protocol in the withdrawal agreement.
My main remarks will be about trade, which is, after all, the most important dimension of our joint relationship, although it is not the only one. I had to look back; it was as long ago as December 2016 when the committee I was then chairing jointly produced for the then EU Committee a document entitled Brexit: The Options for Trade. I had another look at it over the weekend. We were very prescient and far-sighted in the options we looked for. We accepted that Britain would be outside the EU and that we would leave in formal terms the customs union and the single market. I remember saying several times in this House and elsewhere that, in that situation, frictionless trade is a relative term; you have to look at the different implications of the different arrangements.
We looked at a number of arrangements, ranging from membership of the EEA through to trading under WTO rules. It seems to me that all those outcomes might still conceivably be the case. We are no further ahead. In effect, in the latest Council decision, the 441-page treaty which the noble Earl, Lord Kinnoull, has clearly read—he might send me one of his four copies, even if it is in French—the EU clearly goes for the option of something very like an association agreement. In fact, in treaty terms, it will be under Article 217 relating to association agreements.
The British option, as far as one can interpret it, is much closer to the arrangements with Switzerland, as the noble Lord, Lord Kerr, has said. They are looking for a trade agreement but also a whole suite of other agreements. That was an option that we looked at but largely dismissed. It could still be a form of free trade agreement, similar to that agreed with Canada or Japan, or to what the Government used to talk about—Canada-plus-plus-plus. That has been relegated to just one “plus” in recent ministerial announcements, but all those options are still there, as is the bare-bones agreement of limited clauses and effect that was once referred to by David Davis; or it could be on WTO terms, as I say, which is now known as Australia. They are all still available, although the one that we identified at the time as the easiest and least disruptive course to take—namely, to join on EEA terms: the Norway option—although we did not actually advocate it, has been clearly rejected by the Government and, in effect, by the EU. So there are still a lot of potential outcomes between now and the end of December.
It is three and a half years after our report, after two general elections, two Prime Ministers, three Governments and four Secretaries of State. Until very recently, the only continuous presence was that of the noble Lord, Lord Callanan, on the Front Bench opposite—I am pleased to welcome the noble Lord, Lord True, in his stead. There have been many changes in the British political situation since we produced that trade report. However, there has been no serious progress regarding relations on this key issue between ourselves and our largest and closest trading partner.
Do the Government mean what they say about wanting a Swiss-type suite of separate agreements with separate Governments? That has caused many ructions between the EU and Switzerland, and it is a relatively small part of EU trade compared with the EU’s trade with the UK. I am not sure why we need that suite. In the British government documents and the other pronouncements there is, for example, a reference to a bilateral aviation agreement. I hope we have one, otherwise aviation range will fall on 1 January. There was a reference in the timetable for the trade talks—before the virus slowed them down a bit—to talking about a separate aviation safety agreement and a general aviation agreement. I have a Question set down for later in the week about the European Aviation Safety Agency. The situation there, as both the airlines and the aerospace manufacturing industry recognise, is that if we are not careful and do not continue to act very closely with EASA, the airlines will be faced with a situation where their aircraft, their components, and the qualifications of their personnel may be legal at one end of a short European hop but queried at the other end. If we want to diverge, there are consequences. If we do not want to diverge, why do we not say so and reach some sort of association agreement with EASA?
The same applies to many of the other EU agencies, which, during the course of several different withdrawal Bills, I raised in the House. Mrs May, when she was Prime Minister, recognised that there would need to be some separate arrangement on aviation, as she did on chemicals. We had a Question today from the noble Lord, Lord Fox, and the Government were not at all clear on what arrangements would be made for that vital industry. Environmentalists and the industry itself are deeply concerned about the capability of the HSE and air authorities to reproduce the arrangements in the European Chemicals Agency. Indeed, even if we manage to duplicate those arrangements, it is a double administrative cost and charge, and a potential delay for our chemicals-based sector and the industries that use chemicals.
If we are going to have separate agreements on separate areas that are covered by such things as the aviation or chemicals agencies, now we ought to be particularly concerned about the medicines agency, which was of course based here and has already left—and there are many others, for example on food safety. If we are to have a separate agreement on fisheries, the EU will insist that that is reached before we reach a general agreement. Indeed, because of the timing of this, the Government seem to be going along with the view that we can reach a fisheries agreement by June. I think that is unlikely. It is equally unlikely that we will reach a financial services agreement by July. The noble Lord, Lord Kerr, and my noble friend Lord Hain spelled out the ambiguities in meaning of the Northern Ireland protocol and whether we can reach mutual understanding on that in time for this to be all agreed, broadly speaking, by September, and ratified through the European Union and ourselves by December. It is about time for the Government to recognise that, leaving aside the current serious difficulties because of the coronavirus, the timetable they set themselves was never achievable and is certainly not achievable now.
Other issues, such as the level playing field—where we started from the position in Mrs May’s Chequers proposition that we were talking about a common rulebook but ended up with the Government making a virtue of maximum divergence—and state aid, also need to be resolved. There is certainly deep anxiety among our former partners in Europe that there will be heavy state intervention to support competitors against their own industries. Not that long ago, during the election, it was regarded as a very leftist position to look to subsidise British industry—people were worried about Jeremy Corbyn breaching the state aid rules in that regard—but now, with this big-state Toryism, the Government in Brussels and Governments throughout the continent are worried about this Government causing unfair competition. These issues are not easy to resolve and are unlikely to be resolved in the timetable currently announced—but they need to be resolved.
My last point is on accountability to Parliament, which is the main point of my noble friend’s amendment. I understand what the noble Baroness, Lady Noakes, said about the political situation having changed but, like the noble Baroness, Lady Falkner, we are not asking for the exact equivalent of the European Parliament. We are simply asking that both Houses of Parliament are kept informed on the progress of these negotiations and can comment on them.
The strange thing is that, in discussing the potential trade treaty with the United States, the Government have, in effect, given that guarantee, at least to the House of Commons. When we talk about a prospective treaty with the United States, they are prepared to be accountable to Parliament; when we talk about a trade agreement with our largest and closest neighbour, they are not. That needs to be addressed; Parliament needs to assert itself in that process. I support my noble friend’s amendment.
Baroness Falkner of Margravine
Does the noble Lord agree that there are many routes for Parliament to carry out that scrutiny? One route could be a Joint Committee of both Houses or a dedicated Select Committee—possibly even an extension of the European Union Select Committee. It does not have to be a replication of the European Parliament’s powers but can be something where scrutiny is undertaken adequately.
Lord Whitty
I thank the noble Baroness. I agree. We need the principle of scrutiny; the form of it we can debate. We can debate the correct structure within our two Houses but, without the principle being conceded by the Government, we are in an anomalous situation in relation to Europe and to what has been promised on this side of the pond in potential trade negotiations with the United States.
Wellbeing of Future Generations Bill [HL]
Lord Whitty ExcerptsFriday 13th March 2020
(4 years, 8 months ago)
Lords ChamberRead Full debate Wellbeing of Future Generations Bill [HL] 2019-21 View all Wellbeing of Future Generations Bill [HL] 2019-21 Debates Read Hansard Text Read Debate Ministerial Extracts
Lord Whitty (Lab)
My Lords, I congratulate the noble Lord, Lord Bird, on producing this revolutionary and visionary Bill, and I congratulate Welsh colleagues on showing the way.
Reading the Bill as it stands, it does not immediately give the impression of either vision or revolution. It is full of references to new commissioners, joint committees, processes, annual reports and so on. But—and this is the key point—if properly implemented and followed through, it would embed in the mundane processes of government, and to some extent of business, the central principles of sustainability and concern for the well-being of our grandchildren and the generations beyond. That, given what we normally do, is truly revolutionary. All the great revolutionaries, from Jefferson and Robespierre to Stalin and Lenin, saw the point of writing their own ideology into the constitution—though some of them overdid it a bit. This will give us the way to meet the objectives of this Bill, if we take it seriously. It also has the benefit of being subject to parliamentary democracy, and indeed wider democratic participation.
Until recently, most economists have downplayed the problem of future generations on the grounds that economic growth, turbocharged by innovation, would give future generations more resources to sort out their own problems, and that therefore it is an issue of distribution for future generations rather than for us. That no longer holds water. The kind of problems we face now, such as climate change, biodiversity challenges, threats to the cultures of many human societies, resource depletion, overpopulation, inappropriate farming methods and so forth, all mean that future generations will have much bigger problems. Economic growth in and of itself will not give them the means and resources to make those distributional decisions.
I want to make a couple of technocratic points. The first is on the rather modest Part 6 of the Bill, which relates to social value. Those clauses would put into government procurement the need to observe the wide range of cultural and economic effects of social value. Take the example of the buying of food by the public sector: observing social value issues would dramatically change the way in which our food system works. That needs to be taken into account when we come to consider the Agriculture Bill shortly.
My second point does not relate explicitly to the Bill, but was hinted at by the noble Lord, Lord Rees. To summarise, he said that Ely Cathedral was not subject to modern methods of cost-benefit analysis—that indeed is the problem. Almost every decision within government is subject to a net present value calculation based on the discount rate diagnosed and proclaimed by the Treasury in the Green Book. For years, that used to be at 8%, which meant that, 20 years ago, any benefit to anybody in 20 or 30 years’ time was reckoned at pretty much nothing. Now, at 3.5%—which is itself considerably higher than the rates of interest—it reduces £1,000-worth of future benefit in five years’ time to £700. In 20 years’ time, the benefit to future generations, even if we identify it now, would be discounted almost to nothing.
To really make this work, the Government would have to look at this concept and these mechanisms, which are absolutely essential to our appraisal of policies and particular projects. They would need a really thorough going-over, and I hope the Government realise that, if they accept this Bill, this is what they will have to do. I hope the Government do accept it, and that what has been referred to as the Bird Bill turns into the Bird Act, and we put the resources behind it to make it real. I once more congratulate the noble Lord, Lord Bird, on producing today’s Bill.
Social Housing
Lord Whitty Excerpts(5 years, 9 months ago)
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Lord Whitty
That this House takes note of the case for a long-term commitment to increased provision of social housing to help to reduce housing costs, homelessness and housing benefit expenditure.
Lord Whitty (Lab)
My Lords, this year marks the 100th anniversary of the Addison Act of 1919, which first gave general powers for local authorities to build and manage council housing. For decades, council housing was the ambition of millions of families in all walks of life, and for many it still is.
For my main text I have taken the recent report from Shelter’s Social Housing Commission. It starkly sets out how we got here, what are the consequences, and makes proposals for drastic and strategic action to restore the central role of council housing in our housing provision.
I am of course grateful that such a large number of speakers wish to speak in this debate, but I am particularly pleased to see a member of that Shelter commission: my noble friend Lady Lawrence. I look forward to her speech, as well as to the maiden speech of my noble friend Lady Osamor.
It is still the ambition for millions of people in the often exploitative and squalid private sector to obtain social housing provided by local authorities and housing associations. That is why 1.1 million households in England—about 4 million people—are on council waiting lists and desperate for a council house. In London, the ratio of those households on the lists to available property is over 20:1, and in central London it is even higher. Lest this is seen as a purely urban issue, the CPRE estimates that at the present rate it will take 133 years to clear the current waiting lists in rural counties of England.
In the last few decades, from the 1980s onwards, social housing—council housing in particular—has been first disparaged by Governments and media, then curtailed, and then directly attacked. Successive Governments share some of the blame, but the inheritance of the 1980s has done the greatest damage.
Building of social housing has fallen from an average of 126,000 per annum to a few thousand a year—fewer than 7,000 last year. Originally, the Thatcher Government’s right to buy saw 3 million council homes lost, without the proceeds being used to provide for their replacement. Stock transfers and allocation of management to ALMOs has also often removed councils from their housing management role, sometimes with disastrous consequences.
Successive Governments have championed the growth of home ownership, and I do too, but that growth has reached saturation point and gone backwards. It has fallen from 70% to 63% in recent years. In the private rented sector, renting privately often means unaffordable housing costs. Indeed, even within the social housing sector, the insistence on “affordable rent”—which in practice works out at up to 80% of rapidly rising local private rents—has meant that housing costs have been too great for many families. In the private sector, it has meant multiple tenants in overcrowded rooms or even, in some cases, in sheds and outhouses. At the end of this line, it means the tragically burgeoning number of homeless on our streets, which has doubled over the past few years and, as we have seen in the figures today, has gone up again. Those figures are regarded by almost everybody as an underestimate.
Meanwhile, from the Government’s point of view, over the past three decades, state support for housing has not diminished but has shifted dramatically from subsidies for building, improving and managing homes to providing welfare benefits for tenants. Instead of the Exchequer investing in building for the future, state spending goes on an escalating benefit bill, a large proportion of which is now going to private landlords, increasing housing shortages in town and countryside alike.
I often feel angry about this, and the last time I intervened in a housing debate, I just had a rant because I had only four minutes. Colleagues today have only three minutes, so I expect some more of those as well. I was blaming successive Governments, but also the overconcentration of housebuilding and developers, so that their ability to evade any social housing targets has grown. The difficulty that arises for local authorities and housing associations when dealing with private developers is that developers are in a position of strength to argue for a diminution in social housing.
Many simply blame the right to buy; I do not completely. In principle, the right to buy gave the possibility of home ownership to a lot of people who would not otherwise have had it, but local authorities need the right to suspend it and, as noble Lords will know, in Scotland and Wales it has been abolished. The main opposition to right to buy as it has been practised has been because of the failure to use the proceeds to develop new social housing. If we had ploughed all that money back, we would have thriving mixed tenure communities, instead of which we have monolithic areas and misery in the private rented sector.
We often talk about social housing in terms of individual tenants and families, but homes also form communities. I am in favour of mixed tenure communities, but I am not in favour of new developments and regenerations drastically reducing the provision of social housing. For three decades, provision of housing overall in all forms of tenure has been inadequate; the Government acknowledge this, as do all political parties. We have created homes at only about half the rate of the creation of new households, but the social housing sector has suffered most, particularly council housing. Of course, other forms of housing provision ought, in a progressive policy, to play a significant part. Housing associations have a key role to play, as do the various schemes for shared ownership, and there is some scope for bringing back empty homes into use and conversion. But unless we have a strong and clear commitment to a long-term programme of building and converting for new social dwellings at social rent, we can solve neither the housing crisis, nor the social crisis, nor the problem of escalating housing benefit, nor ultimately the problem of homelessness on our streets and of hidden homelessness in many families up and down the country.
The recent Shelter report sets this problem out squarely and comes up with some proposals. In recent months and years, the Government have shown some recognition of the need to build more council homes, particularly in their recent document with a foreword by the Prime Minister herself, but the reality is that the number of homes being brought into being by councils has continued to diminish. The Shelter report calls for a major long-term programme; it envisages 3.1 million social homes being built, mainly by councils, over the next 20 years. That requires a drastic shift to capital and management investment in council housing, away from the growth in housing benefit now caught up, regrettably, in the difficulties surrounding universal credit.
That target is ambitious but it is shared by almost every housing commentator. I was slightly surprised to find, for example, the Centre for Social Justice—normally seen as a right-wing organisation—coming out with not quite the same but rather similar targets and propositions on land reform. Most experts in this field realise that we cannot reverse the current problems in the housing market without councils playing a major role in the building programme. Since the 1920s, they have not: council building has fallen drastically and is now close to zero. The problem has got worse and other solutions, such as the growth of home ownership, are now grinding to a halt.
The situation has been aggravated by two other aspects. The Government have started to address one: the absurd restriction on local authorities building and investing in social housing. That was partly reduced in the recent Budget but it will take some time for that to have any effect. The other dreadful consequence of austerity has been local authorities losing a lot of expertise in their housing, architecture and planning departments, meaning that they are less able than they were in the past to commission new builds and improve their existing estates. That also needs to be reversed; the Government need to see that the money provided to local authorities is there to do just that.
This issue requires a long-term strategy, as Shelter and others have recognised, but the Government and everyone involved in the building industry and housing provision must ensure that the strategy starts now so that we build enough homes for the next generation—homes that families can afford and in which they can be safe and create effective and functioning communities. I will give other speakers an extra four minutes because my voice is going but I hope that they will support the provisions of the Shelter report and my speech. I beg to move.
Lord Whitty
My Lords, I thank everyone who has taken part in this debate. I particularly appreciated the maiden speech of my noble friend Lady Osamor.
Until the Minister spoke, I was going to say that we have a wide consensus in this House. I know the Minister’s heart is with that consensus but he felt obliged to read out—unusually for him—large chunks of his report to defend the Government’s position. However, all Governments have failed on this front and we are faced with a colossal problem. We are in the midst of an enormous housing crisis in general and we will not get out of it without a substantial contribution from council housing.
Yes, that has to be afforded and directed towards the priority areas. The noble Lord, Lord Fraser, asked where the money was coming from. There is a huge amount of money effectively being wasted in housing benefit, which, over a 20-year strategy—if the Treasury was slightly more strategic and intelligent—we could begin to transfer back into building and improving the fabric of housing available to everyone.
I am grateful to all noble Lords who have spoken. The noble Lord, Lord Bird, reminded us that social housing has to be sociable and the right reverend Prelate said that this is all about community, which it is—absolutely. This is not only about individuals but about community. For social housing to meet the needs of people and to become a community, it must be available to more than those who are emergency and urgent cases. That used to be the case and should be again.
Some words have changed their meaning. The word “affordable”, in relation to rent, rapidly needs replacing. I do not disagree with some of what the Minister said but it means that the exorbitant rents that exist in the private sector are now reflected for new tenants in the social sector as well. That is not going to solve any problems.
Finally, as my noble friend Lord Sawyer, said, we are in danger of exacerbating the gap in our society between those who own and those who rent. I would remind my noble friend Lord Sawyer that the most important football result was Millwall 3, Everton 2. However, he makes an important point.
There are wider issues than bricks and mortar in housing—wider even than the safe and secure conditions we seek—because housing has an impact on health, our society as a whole and the dreadful scourge of homelessness. I remind the House that Nye Bevan was Minister for Health and Housing and it may be that a broader remit for the Ministers and the civil servants involved in this field is necessary. For the moment, I thank everyone who has participated and broadly supported the recommendations of the Shelter report. I beg to move.
Democratic Political Activity (Funding and Expenditure) Bill [HL]
Lord Whitty ExcerptsFriday 27th October 2017
(7 years ago)
Lords ChamberRead Full debate Democratic Political Activity (Funding and Expenditure) 2017-19 View all Democratic Political Activity (Funding and Expenditure) 2017-19 Debates Read Hansard Text Read Debate Ministerial Extracts
Lord Whitty (Lab)
Well, my Lords, I suppose I should thank the noble Lord, Lord True, for his totally non-partisan intervention on this issue and for being the only member of the massed ranks of the Conservative Party to come here to defend the totally unbalanced status quo which exists in political funding, which largely favours the Conservative Party, whatever anomalies there may be elsewhere.
I congratulate the noble Lord, Lord Tyler, if only on his perseverance. He has many times attempted to put this rather important issue before the House, and has again produced a detailed Bill. I suppose I have to declare an interest: I am in a very small way a donor to the Labour Party and in a past life have been both a collector and a receiver of rather large affiliation fees, which are relevant to this area.
The Bill is another attempt to clean up what most of the public regard as an appalling state of affairs in political funding. It is not that I agree with every aspect of this Bill; there are some provisions that I do not agree with, and some that I have reservations about—and I may come on to those. But it is important that we debate these issues. The public are concerned about who pays for our politics, how that is disclosed and what those who pay get in return for their donations. The noble Lord, Lord Tyler, takes as his template for this proposal the report by the Committee on Standards in Public Life under Sir Chris Kelly back in 2011. Again, while I support the overall thrust of that committee, I do not necessarily agree with all its recommendations. However, the reality is that successive Conservative-dominated Governments have not taken on board what was the central thrust of that report—namely, that the public do not trust the structure of political funding within this country. That needs to be addressed.
The scandal of the six years in between Chris Kelly’s report and now is that nothing has actually moved. Instead, the only thing that we got in the last Parliament —the first time we had had a majority Conservative Government for 20 years—was the Trade Union Bill, which actually made the balance more unfair. This is a bit of a nostalgic reunion party, because the noble Lords, Lord Tyler and Lord Wrigglesworth, and I sat on the Select Committee during the passage of that Bill, which restrained a bit the Government’s intentions. That Bill was supposed to be about industrial relations and the proper administration of trade unions but was in fact designed to undermine a very large proportion of the financing of the main opposition party—something which, if it had taken place in Belarus, would I am sure have been before the United Nations by now. We restrained it a bit, in the sense that we slowed it down. The report from that Select Committee, incidentally, was unanimous—particularly the part of it that did not propose to change the text of the Bill but called on the House and the Government to go back to the issue and reconvene the political parties to make a new attempt to address the issues raised in the original Chris Kelly report and those resulting from the attempt to change the balance that the Trade Union Bill represented.
The provisions of the Trade Union Act will still affect the long-term finances of the Labour Party. Nothing has been proposed, or is being proposed, to balance that out by an attack on what are, essentially, the main sources of the government party’s finances, which are donations from very rich individuals. That situation was compounded, as the noble Lord, Lord Tyler, said, during the referendum, when a large proportion of both sides was funded by donations from very rich individuals, with no requirement equivalent to the requirements on trade unions, which have to go through several hoops, with opt-outs or opt-ins, and have to set up a separate political fund, disclose and ring-fence it and reiterate the decision to have that political fund every few years. No other organisation or limited company, private or public, and, clearly, no individual has to go through similar hoops. The present balance—or imbalance—needs to be addressed.
There are some detailed points that I could make about the Bill, but I shall probably leave most of them to Committee. The most contentious one is that it would limit expenditure in elections and change the nature of the taxpayer-funded part of political funding, which could be a very difficult political sell. I am not sure that the Bill in present form addresses that sufficiently, although in other contexts the noble Lord, Lord Tyler, has made a number of suggestions that we should take into account. I am not sure that the changes in how taxpayers’ money is given to political parties that are dealt with in the Bill would actually alter the situation. I am not sure that we should totally rely on an amount per vote, and I am reluctant to say that it should all relate to the previous general election. Indeed, I am slightly surprised that the Liberal Democrats are proposing that. Maybe a longer-term run of popular support for parties should be reflected in any public funding.
There seems little appetite from the Government to take a new run at this, to set up an independent commission, to ask the Committee on Standards in Public Life, or even to bring in the political parties again to see whether they can reach some degree of consensus on the way forward. Admittedly, there is not much enthusiasm from the political parties either, but it is the Government who have in their hands the responsibility for the integrity of and public support for our political system. There is, therefore, an onus on the Government to give us some way forward.
I had a fairly lengthy additional point on this; the noble Lord, Lord Tyler, has, to some extent, pre-empted it, but the Bill does not. The Bill reads in a somewhat old-fashioned form, talking about a world of election addresses, mail deliveries, party-political broadcasts, election meetings and so forth, whereas we know that a lot of political discourse, and a lot of the most effective forms of political campaigning, now exist in the cyber world. Our present rules, frankly, do not address that. It is true that, when the election expenses for the last election come to be published, there will be a small line for the main political parties for advertising on social media—it has been reported this week that the Labour Party did rather better than the Conservative Party at that. It relates to placing adverts on Facebook or Twitter and is, as the Bill recognises, another form of media from traditional advertising, in one sense. But the reality is that political life in this country and elsewhere has been seriously affected by the existence of other forms of messages, not necessarily—in fact, not mainly—from political parties, but from influential, well-heeled individuals with nefarious but unpublished intentions throughout the world.
There are different views on whether the cyber intrusion into the political world is a good or a bad thing. Some regard it as a vast advance in democracy, others as a dystopian nightmare, but we cannot deny that it is there. It is true that, to begin with, progressives or, if you like, those on the left of the political spectrum, hailed it as a major improvement—the first Obama election, the Arab spring and so forth. The right in America regarded it as a negative thing, but then got to work. The book Dark Money, which the noble Lord has already referred to, spells out in great detail how American billionaires have greatly influenced the political weather within America, through the Tea Party, through their contacts and, essentially, not so much through advertisements and messages on social media but the intensive mining of sources of data on individuals and groups, which—without any permission from the originators of the data—were collected for commercial and other purposes. They then used that effectively to target their political message. The American right has been extremely successful. Initially, Donald Trump was not the main beneficiary of this, but he became the main beneficiary of it in the end. None of that appears in the accounts of the main American political parties, nor in the accounts of the legitimate election committees for individual candidates within America.
The noble Lord also mentioned that we had a small example of this very clearly in our referendum. This is a serious problem. If Cambridge Analytica and its related companies were using material that was not in practice declared, and if the DUP—the only political party that was party to that—was using it to campaign in Great Britain, one asks why, and also what the source of that money is. I do not know the answer to that. However, the fact that Northern Ireland has different rules on disclosure and allows, for good and understandable historical reasons, donations from outside the United Kingdom to be given to political parties, raises suspicions that that financing operates outside the normal rules for elections in the United Kingdom. Clause 29 extends the Bill to the whole United Kingdom. While we have to respect the fact that some provisions of Northern Ireland legislation are different, in general disclosure matters must be the same across the whole United Kingdom, particularly given that we are now in a situation where a party based solely in Northern Ireland is in effect part of the Government.
Some new issues have been raised. I commend the noble Lord, Lord Tyler, for bringing back the old issues, but the onus is now on the Minister and the Government. If the Minister is prepared to accept that the Bill should go further, we can discuss this again in Committee. If he wants to stop it, the best way of doing so is to announce today a new inquiry and that the Government will call together the political parties to see how best we can progress it, in which case I suspect that the noble Lord, Lord Tyler, will drop this Bill and rely on that process. If, however, the Minister does not give that commitment today, I hope to discuss some of these issues in Committee.
Political Parties (Funding and Expenditure) Bill [HL]
Lord Whitty ExcerptsFriday 10th March 2017
(7 years, 8 months ago)
Lords ChamberRead Full debate Political Parties (Funding and Expenditure) Bill [HL] 2016-17 View all Political Parties (Funding and Expenditure) Bill [HL] 2016-17 Debates Read Hansard Text Read Debate Ministerial Extracts
Lord Whitty (Lab)
My Lords, as others have said, the noble Lord, Lord Tyler, is to be commended for bringing this Bill and this issue before the House, and for his persistence and resilience in this matter—against quite severe odds. This House is a good place for it to be discussed initially. Without an overall majority of any particular party, we can discuss the issues. But at the end of the day, while there are aspects of the Bill that I commend and others that I somewhat disagree with, the main point of the debate is to see how the Minister responds. There is a grave responsibility on the party of government to take the initiative in this respect. I am therefore greatly looking forward to the response of the noble Lord, Lord Young.
Like the noble Lords, Lord Tyler and Lord Wrigglesworth, I served on the Select Committee that was set up in the course of the Trade Union Bill. Since others have not eschewed partisan comments, I will say that that was set up in response to a rather blatant move by the Conservative Government to attempt to bankrupt the largest party of opposition—a move that would be condemned if we were talking about a banana republic purporting to be a proper democracy. That partisan move was part of a pattern but it was probably the most blatant. Over the years, Governments of different parties—Labour and Conservative, at least—have made minor moves to try to restrict the amount of money available to their main Opposition. The Trade Union Bill—Trade Union Act, as it is now—was a major such move, but in all contexts Governments have attempted to restrict the resources available to their opponents.
The point of the Select Committee report endorsed by this House, as the noble Lord, Lord Tyler, said, was that we ought to make another effort to try to reach a consensus on a fairer, more proportionate way forward, which does not impose huge burdens on the taxpayer or on the law but which all parties and all commentators could see as fair and comprehensive.
The Conservative Party manifesto, to which the noble Lord, Lord Tyler, has already referred, not only included a rather vaguely worded commitment to do something about trade union political funds but committed a future Conservative Government to do exactly what we are asking for—to set up a new initiative to look at party funding as a whole. The noble Lord, Lord Sherbourne, is not here, but it is fair to say that all members of the Select Committee were appalled at the complete indifference of Ministers who came to the committee to their own responsibilities, which they effectively put back to the individual parties. That applied to the Conservative members as much as to the Labour, Liberal Democrat and independent members of that committee. The reply to which the noble Lord, Lord Tyler, has referred, which we eventually got, does not really take us any further.
I suppose I should have declared a past interest at the beginning. For many years I administered a political fund for my union, the GMB, and subsequently I was the grateful recipient of trade union political funds as general secretary of the party. It is well known and fairly straightforward that my party has been pretty dependent on those funds. But I have always recognised that the way in which those funds are raised and passed to the party is controversial. That has reflected the public concern referred to in the report of the Committee on Standards in Public Life and earlier today. The issue is about opting out or opting in to the political funds, and to donations to political parties. For many years, I have strongly defended the opting-out provisions but I recognise the pressure there. Since that Chris Kelly report, it seems that the Labour Party has moved somewhat in the direction that it suggested.
Being an old cynic and old negotiator, I was not too keen on the move that followed my noble friend Lord Collins of Highbury’s report—not because of the rights or wrongs of the principles, but because I thought that the Labour Party was giving away one of the cards that it ought to be playing when multi-party negotiations started, which at that time I hoped would be fairly soon. I am not entirely in favour of what we have done but the fact is that we have made a move and there has been no reciprocal move from the other parties, particularly not from the Conservative Party, which has the responsibility in government. The situation now is that following the reforms under Ed Miliband and on the basis of my noble friend Lord Collins’s report, the trade unions face a double opt-in: you have to opt in to the political fund and then opt in to pay an affiliation fee to the Labour Party.
No other source of funds and no other political party faces those same barriers. I have had occasion to refer to this before but in the five years up to our report under the Trade Union Bill proceedings, £64 million was donated by trade unions to political parties, almost all of that to the Labour Party. However, more than another £80 million was donated by other organisations, the vast majority of which went to the Conservative Party. Whereas trade unions have to have a separate political fund and had to provide for their members to opt out of it, and now to opt into it, as well as having to have a periodic renewal of that political fund, the other organisations have no such restrictions. We are therefore faced with a very lop-sided system for legal organisations’ contribution to our political process.
The provisions of the Bill refer to membership organisations, by which I hope it means not only trade unions but corporate entities, partnerships and others that have made donations to political parties in the past and continue to do so. It will also involve the co-operative organisations and friendly societies. There will be particular problems for the Co-op Party which need to be taken on board during the process here. If all organisations faced the same hurdles and the same need to ensure that their members took a positive decision to pay money to a political party, the public’s anxiety and suspicion of where that money goes and what strings are attached to it would be significantly relieved.
I have a number of issues in relation to the Bill, which I would return to in detail were it to proceed further after today. I agree with the noble Lord, Lord Bew, and others who have referred to the need to update the provisions of our political fund regulations, in particular into areas of third parties or front organisations and in relation to the importance of social media as a means of communicating messages, which can frequently be targeted clearly at particular constituencies and groups of people. We need to catch up with that.
It is clear that if the main purpose of the Bill, which is to limit the level of donations, is to succeed it has to be accompanied by some other provisions: limits on spending at local and, particularly, at national level; limits on the way in which organisations can channel their money; and, most controversially of all, a degree of state funding in order that political parties can flourish. I know that that is not a particular priority, given the difficult fiscal situation. Nevertheless, if the case were made that state funding was part of the solution—and were the solutions which the noble Lord, Lord Tyler, has put forward in a different context for redistributing, in a more meaningful way, what state funding currently exists, so that the net result would be relatively small—it would be accepted.
Whatever our individual views—a number of views have been expressed around the House as to what the Bill ought to cover—what is really key today is whether the Government, in the person of the noble Lord, Lord Young of Cookham, can commit themselves to taking an initiative to get a review. We need a new start to look, on as consensual a basis as possible, at the need to produce a comprehensive package that will put political funding on a fairer basis. We should not kid ourselves. When Sir Chris Kelly produced his report, he referred to the deep concern among the public. Even in recent days, we have seen concern about the interference of vested interests in our politics through monetary proceedings, not all of which are as transparent as they should be. As the noble Lord, Lord Bew, said, transparency is key but it is not enough. I hope that the debate today will provoke the Minister to make a more positive response than his predecessors have on this issue, and to trigger a whole new start in looking at it, so that we can begin to put public trust back into the funding of political parties.
Party Funding Reform
Lord Whitty Excerpts(8 years ago)
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Lord Whitty (Lab)
My Lords, like the noble Lord, Lord Leigh, my voice might give out, so I will try to keep it brief. I do not have the same excuse as him, either.
Like others on the speakers list, I served on the Select Committee on the then Trade Union Bill a few months ago, under the chairmanship of the noble Lord, Lord Burns. That was in the context of a Bill to restrict activities for trade unions. It focused on the political funding for one party and from one source. The Bill intended to put restrictions on, and increase greater transparency of, that source, I think its proponents would say. Following the Select Committee, its recommendations and decisions of this House and of another place, some of those restrictions were slowed down, but nevertheless they will have a serious impact on the ability of trade unions to fund political parties, and therefore on the funding over time of the Labour Party.
I did not support the proposals in the Trade Union Bill. I do not really approve of even the revised proposals. But the important point tonight is that those changes affected one source of funding and, in effect, one political party. They had no effect on other institutions or individuals, and no effect—as it stands at the moment—on other political parties.
As I have said in the House before, in the five years up to the last election about £148 million was given in political donations by organisations as distinct from individuals. Some £65 million of that was from trade unions; therefore more than £80 million was given by other organisations. Trade unions are all required to have a separate political fund; they are all required to make a decision on that political fund and its retention every 10 years; they must all allow a member to opt out of it and, as a result of the Trade Union Act, members will eventually be allowed only to opt in. None of the other organisations, companies, trusts, friendly societies or partnerships which make the bulk of the institutional donations to parties—the great majority of which go to the Conservative Party although some of it goes to other parties, including my own—has such restrictions applied to it. There is now a requirement for listed companies to take a vote, but only once and without any separate political fund.
Although I opposed the restrictions on the trade unions, the whole experience of that Select Committee brought home to me yet again the unfairness and lack of principle underlying our rules on political funding. I think that I can speak for all members of the Select Committee, including those from the Conservative Party, in saying that we were shocked when Ministers came to tell us that absolutely nothing had been done by the Government to fulfil their election manifesto commitment to seek agreement with other parties. We noted this in paragraph 138 of our report and urged the Government to reconvene cross-party talks and seek agreement. In the months since then, nothing has happened. Like the noble Lord, Lord Wallace, I hope that the Minister will tell us tonight what is being done to address this issue.
This is not just a question of equity and balance between parties; it also relates to the health of our democracy. It is not healthy for any political party to depend on significant donations from the super-rich—and a very limited number of them. It is not healthy for a decreasing number of institutions, large corporations or private companies to provide support to political parties. I also accept that it is not healthy for a political party to depend solely or mainly on the admittedly reduced sources of funding from trade unions either.
We all know that in principle none of this is justifiable to the public or, quite often, to ourselves. We all know that we need to look at the level of political expenditure. The noble Lord, Lord Leigh, said that it is small here compared with other things, but as far as the public are concerned it is still a significant overspend, particularly in general elections. We need to look at limits on such expenditure and at enforcement of limits at both national and local level by the Electoral Commission and others.
I disagree profoundly with the noble Lord, Lord Leigh, that state funding should be excluded. We have the lowest level of state support for political parties in the whole of Europe and many other parts of the world—there is even significant state funding in the United States, even though you would think that they were awash with money in the first place. The health of and support for those other European countries’ political democracies are not diminished by a significant role for state funding in their operations. I do not want utter dependence on state funding; I hope with others for more encouragement for small donations to political parties and for a wider range of institutions to give relatively small donations. However, there is a role for state funding; it is not an entirely new principle—we have significant funding in terms of Short money and Cranborne money. We also have security subsidies for our conferences and freepost at election times; and, if one counts the BBC and the other television companies as part of the state, we have free airtime for party-political broadcasts.
So it is not a principle but, when we look at it again, the balance between state funding and the form of that political funding should be part of that review. As we said in our Select Committee report, the reality is that the public do not like the present situation. They consider it unhealthy and potentially corrupt. The prospect of state funding of political parties by the taxpayer is not particularly popular either, but in terms of balance it may well be regarded by the public as the lesser of two evils. I do not wish to see a situation where political parties are utterly dependent on the state, but I see state funding, along with limitations on the level of expenditure, as part of the package. Above all, as we said on the Trade Union Act 2016, whatever comes out of the talks that I hope that the Minister will tonight announce will be convened must be equitable between political parties, and seen to be by our electors.