Legislation: Skeleton Bills and Delegated Powers

Viscount Eccles Excerpts

Thursday 6th January 2022 Lords Chamber

[Viscount Eccles (Con)]

My Lords, I think we are approaching some form of consensus but the problem is: what does one do when one has achieved that consensus? Many years ago, I was on the Merits Committee and subsequently on the Delegated Powers Committee. We experienced many of the issues that have been highlighted in these two excellent reports. It was on those committees that I discovered the depth of skill and professionalism of the staff of this House. They were a mine of historical and current information. They told us many of the things that the committees are being told again today.

However, it has always been the case that Executives want to make their lives easier by limiting the powers of legislatures. As life gets more complicated, there is no chance at all that that is going to go away. After all, everybody would like to have a weekend off every now and again. Although sometimes I think that the stress on Parliament is exaggerated, it is nevertheless true that there is a problem of parliamentary time.

One can have all the good ideas about what should happen. I well remember coming out of a trustees meeting at Kew, where we had seven members of the Royal Society on the board. They had extremely good ideas and the chief executive of what was then SmithKline Beecham said to me afterwards, “John, we need to remember that although we have a lot of people who have very bright ideas with which we agree, we will be lucky if we can find one or possibly two people who can carry them out.”

Therefore, the challenge to this House is: what can we do about this complicated and unsatisfactory situation? We have to start from a position where we do not have much leverage, and that is never a comfortable position to be in when one is in negotiation. I agree with my noble friend Lord Hodgson of Astley Abbotts that we need to limit our ambitions to something we believe is negotiable and for which we may have the leverage. That would be—although it entails a lot more work—an increase in our ability to scrutinise, and practice of scrutinising, secondary legislation. That is probably the most practical road to go down.

I should like to share just one memory. I was on the Merits Committee when we threw out the statutory instrument to set up a grand casino in Manchester. So that has been done and there is no reason why the House of Lords should not, given suitable debate on the detail, go down that path again. However, as has been said by several Members, our relationship with the Back Benches of the House of Commons will also be the clue as to whether we can get there and improve this situation.

Northern England: Opportunity and Productivity

Viscount Eccles Excerpts

Thursday 12th January 2017 Lords Chamber

[Viscount Eccles (Con)]

My Lords, I, too, am very grateful to the noble Baroness, Lady Massey, for this debate. I want to concentrate on the north-east.

In 1954, I went to live and work in the north-east. I lodged at 195 Durham Road, Stockton-on-Tees, with a Mrs Aucutt. Mrs Aucutt was a very significant figure. She worked for the council and controlled coal rationing. There is a certain irony in that when we think about the state of the coal industry in County Durham and along the coast of the north-east. There is not a single deep mine left. Much the same has happened in our part of the country to shipbuilding and to those firms that participated in the nuclear power industry in the days when we were building gas-cooled reactors. Global economics and political decisions have changed the scenery dramatically. Even steel is in trouble.

At that time, there were many headquarters of companies operating in that part of the north-east. Of course, they had with them many professionals who lived in the area. At much the same time, I bought myself a bicycle and bicycled across the wilderness between north Stockton and Middlesbrough. The visibility was not always very good and there was a strong smell of burnt cheese most mornings. To the left was ICI Billingham. What has happened to ICI was then unthinkable.

When we think about these things, we should remember—because it is much more important to think about the future than about the past—the huge changes that have taken place and consider the legacy. Middlesbrough is the third-largest port in the country. The chemical industry, which is born of companies such as ICI and Billingham Synthonia and so on, is going ahead strongly. There is the North East of England Process Industry Cluster, with a fantastic website which I recommend. It is doing extremely well both domestically and in exports, with very good success in building its supply chains effectively. One member of the cluster is an American corporation called Huntsman, valued at $5 billion on the New York Stock Exchange. It has among its subsidiaries a business that was called in my day British Titan Products. That was a very sound, steady British business bought in the late 1970s by Huntsman, which is a truly global corporation with subsidiaries all over the world. It still has a manufacturing plant on Teesside and an innovation centre. We should work even harder than we do to attract inward investment from such corporations which have had a successful time in the north-east of England. So not all is gloom.

The north-east also has iconic places; this is important because, if you want international business to come with middle-sized enterprises into the north-east, it must be attractive. There is Durham; Shakespeare and the opera come to Newcastle; there is the Beamish museum; there are Jonathan Ruffer’s great efforts in Bishop Auckland; and there is the Bowes Museum. Why is the Bowes Museum not a national one? The idea has been about for a long time; it meets every standard. Is it just because it is in the north that it has never been made a national museum? Such recognition would be a great boost—a psychological move maybe, but that is not to be despised. We all need confidence, and recognition helps.

Charities (Protection and Social Investment) Bill [HL]

Viscount Eccles Excerpts

Monday 20th July 2015 Lords Chamber

[Baroness Hollis of Heigham (Lab)]

The noble Baroness, Lady Gardner, made a very powerful point about the Minister considering the opinion of the House. Whether my noble friend will vote or not will be her judgment call.

The noble Lord, Lord Cormack, was absolutely right—this is the right amendment to the wrong Bill. The reason it is the wrong Bill is that we are actually back to front on this. I speak as chair of a housing association; I will be time-expired in the autumn. I remind the House that the bedroom tax is forcing up arrears; tenants’ incomes have been not only frozen but cut, given some of the Budget changes; rents will be reduced; the HCA grant no longer makes new build possible; and we are increasingly dependent, therefore, on arrangements with local authorities, private bodies or charitable bodies to get the land on which we can continue to build affordable homes. Given the proposal to add the right to buy, I am going to be spending a lot of the rest of this month trying to see whether a housing association such as mine will actually be around in a few years’ time. In fact, I think it will be gutted.

As I say, I hope I am wrong. I very much hope, as the noble Lord, Lord Cormack, said, that the other place will make adjustments to the Bill. We all want to promote home ownership and the shared ownership that housing associations can build; that would be the best way forward. None the less, we should protect and ring-fence housing associations, which can make an unequalled contribution, particularly in rural areas, to the viability of communities and enable young people who have nowhere else to rent and can never afford to buy to stay in villages and small towns. My local authority has lost nearly 40% of its best stock—semi-detached houses, 12 to the acre, overlooking the park where the sun always shines. They have gone and we are left with maisonettes and walk-up flats. The properties that we sold have been recycled and are now occupied by three or four students—often creating some nuisance, I am afraid, for the next-door neighbours, but with great profits to the owners. That was never the intention.

We have a dilemma. If my noble friend is satisfied with the Minister’s reply and does not think it right to test the opinion of the House on whether such protection for charities should be foremost in our minds when considering the housing association Bill, we will have missed an opportunity. Our colleagues in the other place should take into account the worries and views of this House, expressed so powerfully by the noble Lords, Lord Kerslake and Lord Best, and my noble friend Lord Campbell-Savours. I do not usually use phrases like “sending a message” or “sending a signal” but we have an opportunity to say that, while we accept that this is not the right Bill to carry an amendment like this, the House is extremely concerned about the future viability of housing associations. Housing associations such as mine, which do not deal with stock transferred from local authorities, were charitable from the beginning. We may lose that stock and find that we do not exist as a charity in a few years’ time; and here, we have a Bill that is about charities.

I understand the well founded misgivings of the noble Lord, Lord Cormack—he may be right intellectually—and the concerns of the noble and learned Lord, Lord Mackay of Clashfern, with whom this issue can be discussed further. He is absolutely right to say that CPO powers have always been used, but they none the less have to be verified all the way up to ensure that they are being used appropriately. As a local authority leader I have, in the past, gone for CPO powers. However, with those reservations, we need today to say that we are worried about charities. We could say to the National Trust that we will take its assets to refurbish the Palace of Westminster. Why not? Dealing with a grade 1 listed building would be a perfectly legitimate use of the trust’s assets, but no one would go down that route. However, we are doing something similar to housing associations whose distinctive characteristic is that they are charities, and whose purpose, rationale, finances and viability may be deformed by proposals that are going to come our way.

In the light of everything that has been said—including the powerful remarks of the noble Lord, Lord Cormack—if this House decides to accept my noble friend’s amendment and to say to the other place, “Think again before you go ahead with that Bill”, on this occasion, that is the right thing to do.

[Viscount Eccles (Con)]

My Lords, if signals are to be sent, Hansard is the place in which they can be read. Ministers on our Front Bench are also very good at passing on the feeling of this House. If we were to pass this amendment, we would be placing a duty on the Charity Commission that it would never be able to perform. It only needs Parliament to make some decision or another for this amendment to become inoperable by the commission. As the noble and learned Lord, Lord Hope of Craighead, said, the commission must be hoping that the amendment is not passed, because it would in no way be in its interests if it were.

[Lord Beecham (Lab)]

My Lords, I declare my local authority interests, one of which is to represent the ward in which the mother of the noble Lord, Lord Graham, used to live, in a rather—at that point—grim housing association block. It was part of the Sutton’s estate, which has been transformed over recent years. It now provides extremely good and very popular housing, and there are other housing associations in the same small ward in my local authority, Newcastle. Anchor in particular has two or three developments. It is worrying that the Government’s arrant intention to nationalise with a view to privatising, which is effectively what their policies on social housing amount to, will impact on that provision.

The amendment does not address the issue of housing only. Other charities might well be caught by other developments of the kind the Government propose to bring forward in relation to housing. For example, one could envisage charities running medical services—hospitals, perhaps—being required to put those on the market and dispose of them to other organisations. There will be other examples. The National Trust is one; it is an interesting thought that your Lordships’ House and others might be saved by acting towards them as is apparently intended towards housing associations—I suspect that that is unlikely to happen. But there is a principle here which is wider than the important and topical principle of social housing, and could apply across a range of functions carried out by charities. For that reason, it is important for this House to consider the amendment seriously.

Some of the questions raised by the noble and learned Lords, Lord Hope and Lord Mackay, and the noble Lord, Lord Cormack, are valid: the wording of the amendment is perhaps not ideal. But it is not enough simply to say that Hansard will be read by Ministers at the other end and that is all there is to it. An amendment passed by this House would require fuller consideration than simply a reading of Hansard would be likely to engender. In any event, in the House of Commons it is possible to refine and improve the amendment to meet the points that the noble and learned Lords raised about the precise wording.

While we may well have an opportunity, unfortunately, of returning to this subject in the event of a specific measure coming from the Commons in relation to housing, it would be a sensible course to take to pass the amendment, particularly in view of the great concern expressed by the social housing movement. I bear in mind particularly the reference of the noble Lord, Lord Palmer, to the financing of future development, given that housing associations borrow against the value of their stock. If that is to be diminished, as it would be over time, it would obviously weaken them. But, as I have said, it is not the only case which gives rise to concern. On that basis, I hope that, if my noble friend decides to test the opinion of the House, your Lordships will support her, and encourage and facilitate a review of the position by the Government and the Commons.

Charities (Protection and Social Investment) Bill [HL]

Viscount Eccles Excerpts

Tuesday 23rd June 2015 Grand Committee

[Lord Hope of Craighead]

I have a point to make on the wording of the amendment, although it is not quite the same as the noble Lord, Lord Hodgson of Astley Abbotts, thought it might be. It is about Amendment 11, and it is a rather technical point. I am aware that the noble and learned Lord, Lord Scott of Foscote, who knows much more about drafting trust documents of this kind than I do, may have a different view. The point that troubles me is the phrase,

“who are direct beneficiaries of the charity”.

As I understand it, to qualify as a charity, individuals as such are not direct beneficiaries. That is the creature of a private trust, where a trust is framed to confer a defined benefit on a particular individual. It would meet the noble Baroness’s point if the rather less attractive phrase,

“who are within the objects of the charity”,

was substituted. That would then bring in the point that she is considering people on whom the trustees would focus as possible recipients of benefit. That would be the kind of phrase that I would use myself, but I am conscious that the noble and learned Lord may know more on this than I do, although he is shaking his head. It is a point on wording, which would arise if the Minister was attracted by the amendment.

[Viscount Eccles (Con)]

I shall add a thought. I think that we are talking about charities that are deliberately set up to benefit children and added-in vulnerable people, but may I move to museums for a minute? I refer to a registered museum that allows children under 16 to enter free, for example. Let us say that somebody gets into a fracas, one child hits another and somebody else enters in. Widening the responsibilities of the Charity Commission and the trustees of that museum as the amendments propose is completely unrealistic. If there are remedies to be sought, they should be sought under another piece of legislation and not under charity law. We have already had reference to the chilling effect on people volunteering to be trustees if they see that the responsibilities are made so wide and so difficult to adhere to. We really have to be careful. The Minister referred to the limited resources of the Charity Commission. Under existing circumstances, it is not likely that those resources will be added to, to any great degree, at least for a while. We need to be very careful about what responsibilities we place on the Charity Commission and trustees under this proposed legislation.

Charities (Protection and Social Investment) Bill [HL]

Viscount Eccles Excerpts

Wednesday 10th June 2015 Lords Chamber

[Viscount Eccles (Con)]

My Lords, following the noble Baroness, Lady Kramer, there is undoubtedly a problem—and an understandable one—in relation to pressure. I have always said that if you are a fundraiser, you need a wicked smile and not to leave until you have the money. It is not easy to raise funds. That leads me to the reflection that, if life is complicated and quite often ends in a muddle, we cannot expect the charitable endeavour in this country ever to be anything else but pretty complicated and quite often in a muddle.

I have one other reflection before I start, as it were. My noble friend Lord Borwick suggested that he who pays the piper calls the tune. We should always remember that if you accept money, you have to pay some attention to the donor.

For quite a long time, I have been a trustee, fundraiser, adviser and donor—I think that I am probably all of those things still. The ones that need to be on the register are, I hope, correctly on the register. To illustrate the length of time that I am talking about, I am a life member of a charity, for which I paid £20.

This Bill is a welcome measure and one that has been very well prepared. In being prepared, it has been discussed in detail and very well argued. It has the full support of the Charity Commission, and I must say that I have been very impressed in recent times by the way in which the Charity Commission puts its points across to those of us who are engaged. No doubt the detail will come out in Committee and later, and other noble Lords have talked about that with much more understanding than I would have done.

Let me go to the wider scene. We all agree about the merits of charitable endeavour: its very long history and the need for it, which grows as life gets more complicated. I think that we all agree that there needs to be a balance in our country between the way that the economy is run and what it is expected to do, how taxation should play its part, the democratic aspirations of the people who pay the taxes and how we control public expenditure. That balance has never been more in question than it is now.

Although I quite understand the point made by the noble Viscount, Lord Chandos, that the Government may expect, in some way, the gaps to be filled by others as they try to reduce public expenditure, my view is that the gaps are inevitable. The noble Viscount gave us a very good explanation of why the gaps are there and need to be dealt with. He cited innovation, and that must be right. Lots of things go on in our society which do not fit the postcode lottery school of thought that everything should be the same for everybody. Lots of things go on where ticking boxes about the highest common factor, or even the lowest common denominator, simply does not work and where independent solutions are needed. If charities are full of innovation, some of the solutions will work and some of them will not work so well. However, the flexibility, imagination and judgment that charities can exercise are a very important component of the total picture in our society.

Indeed, on occasion, charities will come up with ideas that we will think are slightly zany. However, if people are exercising flexibility, imagination and judgment, the chances are that there will be problems, that things will go wrong and that some people will deliberately make things go wrong. Therefore, we clearly need a monitor and regulator. We have one with what is, in my view, a growing and excellent database of information, which has made very welcome progress in recent years—on that I entirely agree with the noble and learned Lord, Lord Hope of Craighead. The greater powers for it to exercise its role are welcome as well.

In thinking about the impressive performance of the Charity Commission, we have had reference to the 160,000 regulated charities, the staff of 300 people and the budget of £20 million a year. If noble Lords were to look across the regulator scene and try to find another regulator that is making as good a shot at doing what it is required to do as the Charity Commission is, they might look a long way before finding one. Much progress is being made, but the really interesting question is, where next? To my mind, the Charity Commission has a clear sense of direction.

The Bill provides for a review, and I want to spend my last couple of minutes on that. The review should be on,

“how the Act affects … public confidence in charities … the level of charitable donations, and … people’s willingness to volunteer”.

There are two negatives to that. First, the motivation for volunteering and the results of volunteering are, in my experience, very complicated subjects. That is for another day, but, in the mean time, I would like to remember, as I always do, that volunteers have a divine right to be unreasonable.

The second negative that I want to get out of the way is about public confidence. It has already been said that there is a danger that Her Majesty’s Government and the Cabinet Office—Parliament, even—can do things that do not improve the public’s confidence in charities. I am sure that that is true. Here we get into the extremely complicated subject of independence, which is best summed up by saying that when somebody tells you that they have independence and are treated at arm’s length, you need to suggest to them that probably their arm is regularly being twisted.

There is an issue around what was billed very prominently—not in the previous Administration but in the one before that—as the third sector. There has been reference today to the degree to which some registered charities are in fact being funded by the taxpayer. There is something there that we have to think about very carefully, because every time you take money, you must remember that he who pays the piper calls the tune.

Another issue is the connection between public confidence in charities and the level of charitable donations. I am not clear as to whether “level of charitable donations” means donations to charities, donations from charities or both. When considering charitable endeavour, one has to be very conscious of the fact that it is both that we are thinking about. For example, Henry Smith was lucky enough to own land that subsequently became part of London. His charity, and others such as the Wellcome Trust, does not spend any time raising money but runs what is, in effect, a massive endowment fund that distributes the income from that fund, and sometimes part of the capital, to other charities. We know a great deal about those very big, top-tier charities. Indeed, the whole charitable endeavour in our country would be completely different if they did not exist. It would be very interesting to have a better grip on exactly how important they are.

Small donors have also been referred to. Charities such as those for birds or lifeboats are massively successful. All through its history the lifeboat charity has been, to a degree, a substitute for money coming from the taxpayer—it is extremely well known and has extremely successful services. However, to introduce a slightly discordant note, sometimes the business of animals gets rather complicated in our minds. We wonder whether we understand what we might call the mass appeal charities as well as we thought.

To me, there is a gap in the middle. There is a great need to understand in much more depth and detail the middle rank of charities. Where do they come from, why are they created, what do they do, how do they do it and can we think more positively about how that part of the system can work better than it does now? Indeed, we would probably find that nearly all the investigations undertaken by the Charity Commission to date—it is a formidable number and there has been a formidable rate of increase over the last three years—have been in that middle sector.

I believe that there is the same need about donors. We understand about big donors. They get their names on boards. I was in the British Library this morning and I read the board with some interest. We understand about how small donors behave; there are millions of them and they behave with great consistency. We have heard today about the difficulties that can be faced in that sector. But I do not believe that we understand at all well what the people in the middle do or do not do about forming charities or giving money to charities—their total charitable endeavour. There is huge potential there which we are not at the moment making a good job of tapping. I look forward to the further stages of the Bill.

Soft Power and the UK’s Influence (Select Committee Report)

Viscount Eccles Excerpts

Tuesday 10th March 2015 Lords Chamber

[Viscount Eccles (Con)]

My Lords, it is a privilege to follow the noble Lord, Lord Crisp, whose knowledge of what is happening in global health is unparalleled. It is also a pleasure to serve with him on the group, of which he is a co-chair and where he is doing very useful work.

As for persuasion and power, I am not sure I am not keener on persuasion than power. As this is a big and comprehensive report, my focus will be on the part which deals with DfID, the aid programme, international development and the Government’s response. I feel that there is a certain out-of-balance approach to aid and international development in the way that we are handling it now. It is not that what we are doing is not okay; it is just that I think we could be doing a lot more.

In the time that I was with what is now the CDC Group, I knocked about in 50 different countries looking for economic opportunities with high development returns and, usually, sustainable but rather low financial returns. This was because, as a gap filler, we were looking to do things that the fully commercial private sector did not find attractive. In doing that we carried with us our own marketing, investigation, engineering and agricultural skills. This enabled us to know, for example, that in Uganda we could upgrade the hydroelectric power station at Owen Falls from 24 to 36 megawatts by installing new innards in the dam which were available because of modern technology. To do that you had to know something about the electricity generation and distribution industry. Indeed, at the time, only 60% of the electricity being generated in Uganda was actually being paid for.

We also went to the island of New Ireland which looks out on the Bismarck Sea. The villages down the coast are alternately Catholic and Protestant and, in the middle, there is a Baha’i village called Madina. There we took coconut lands out of production and put in oil palms. It was experimental and innovative. We knew that we could probably do it successfully because of our knowledge of soils and rainfalls; of how to build a proper factory and how to out-load the palm oil into the Bismarck Sea. We came across the graveyards of ancestors, although the Government promised us that the land tenure arrangements were perfectly okay. They also promised us a road which we never got. Nevertheless, because we had the capacity and the people who knew how to get round those problems, it was a success—as, indeed, was clonal tea in the back blocks of Malawi. There we built a small clinic, as we always did. When I was visiting, I always used to open the door of the fridge to see what was in it; very often there was not very much. We built a school but one could find, with deep regret, that there was no teacher. We also made sure that the employees had good seeds for their gardens. The introduction of hybrid seeds into many parts of Africa has been a long struggle but, once managed, the benefits are seen.

One lesson from all this is that, if you can find economic opportunities—and they may be marginal and in difficult places—then go for them. Do not allow people to tell you that, if you do not have a perfect set of conditions, you should not be doing it. The rule of law may have holes in it. Certainly, land tenure very often does. Governments make promises which they do not always keep. Accounting standards in those places were not always up to scratch. It was probably more like the days of Abraham Darby and Adam Smith when there were not any aid programmes.

In my view, the great strength of our aid programme and of DfID is in disaster relief, reconstruction, poverty alleviation, health, and disease control. The NGOs and charities that work with them are fantastic. Mercy Ships and my noble friend Lord McColl; a charity called Send a Cow, built up by a colleague of mine from the past; and VSO, as has been mentioned, are all wonderful. I believe that DfID could and should be doing more; certainly in the area of health, there seem to be no limits. However, the middle ground—the ground that DfID occupies between disaster relief, poverty alleviation and health issues, and economic development—seems much more uncertain. We get caught up in the international bureaucracy of overseas development assistance. We worry about reputations—about inputs rather more than about outputs.

Maybe some values are universal, once people have adequate food. Considering what we were told after the war was going to happen, for example in India, it is amazing how successful the world has been at feeding itself. It has not been completely adequate but it has been much more adequate than we ever supposed in those days. I suggest that these values are universal: a roof that does not leak; cooking you can do without filling the house with smoke; a doctor or a nurse not far away; a school for your children and, if you are on a river in somewhere such as Sarawak, an engine for your boat. Maybe we should be talking more about universal values and not just about British values.

I also worry about capacity building for the reasons I have already given: the abstract nature of the language and the caution of the people engaged in it so that we are always going to do tomorrow what actually needs to be done today. Why is there this hesitation? Aid enthusiasts and managers are basically very uncomfortable with limited liability companies working as the seizers of economic opportunity in economic development. To them, the whole thing is too risky and too capitalist. It is all about income and its distribution between stakeholders, whereas the aid enthusiasts and managers are controllers of expenditure. Their conclusion is that conventional economic development is not really aid and that it is something which is better left to others. If and when they do get involved, it is through intermediaries. Indeed, the government response to the report and comments in other material suggest that that is really what they are saying. This seems to me, in 2015, to be wrong and in need of change. The skills and technology for economic development in difficult places are too badly wanted and it is too urgent that these matters are carried forward for them to be contracted out to others. This activity needs to be an integral part of the aid programme, and in making it so, we should remember how we came to be a developed nation. Why do we think that it can happen so differently for others?

Gaza

Viscount Eccles Excerpts

Wednesday 8th February 2012 Lords Chamber

[Viscount Eccles]

My Lords, I am sure that the key to the future lies in economic development because at the moment the level of such development in Gaza is very low. I am grateful to DfID for some statistics. In 2006, there were some 100,000 jobs in the private sector, but there are now 30,000. Exports of horticultural products have recommenced to Israel and the West Bank, but they are at a tenth of what they were in 2006. So the challenge is to redevelop the small business sector and export performance which Gaza has achieved in the past. If there is a longer-term future, perhaps it lies in a switch of development finance investment and aid investment by engaging multinational companies sympathetic to the Palestinian cause and acceptable in the region to set up subsidiaries in Gaza. That may be a dream, but it has been done many times before. The people of Gaza have the skills and the education to play their part and the finance is there. It only needs a switch from aid to development finance investment. The future could be positive, but it requires the cessation of both violence and the threat of violence from wherever it comes.

Social Policy

Viscount Eccles Excerpts

Wednesday 16th June 2010 Lords Chamber

[Viscount Eccles]

My Lords, I add my thanks to the right reverend Prelate the Bishop of Leicester for introducing this debate and my congratulations to the noble Lord, Lord Wei. As I follow the right reverend Prelate the Bishop of Chester, I wish to make a boxing analogy with regard to partnerships. If you get into a boxing ring as the most fleet of foot lightweight in the world and you meet a heavyweight, the heavyweight has to land only one punch. When we think about partnerships between the state and whoever, we should not forget that.

At this time in the evening, following the speeches of four right reverend Prelates and one most reverend Primate, it is difficult not to reflect a bit on how we have got to where we are. We probably would not have our democracy if it had not been for the Church of England. The way in which powerful institutions stood between the king and the people has got us to where we are. Sometimes when we get into all the detail, we forget how we got to where we are. Indeed, the Motion refers to “shaping social policy”. In saying that, it distinguishes between policy implementation and the creation of policy. It asks us to think a bit about directions of travel rather than detailed implementation. Probably 10 people can make a contribution to policy shaping whereas probably only one or two are very good at implementation. If one takes child poverty as just one example, it is easy to have a pretty clear idea about what you would like to do about it, but not so easy to achieve it. I wish to separate policy and implementation.

Many people have shaped social policy—classically, Charles Dickens, and later, Orwell. I interpose here that some of these people were romantics. Some of the comment on getting from romanticism to reality disregards the fact that the people who start these processes are very often romantics; for example, T S Eliot and, I suggest, Archbishop Temple. Then we come to perhaps the most outstanding shaper of social policy, Beveridge, and his 1942 report. Beveridge was a liberal public servant. All of the members of his team who wrote the 300-page report were civil servants.

Today, we have talked a lot about the big society and the shaping of social policy under it. Social policy has developed far beyond Beveridge. Some of the developments have been extremely beneficial and some of them much more questionable. Why has this happened? I suppose the principal reason is that science and technology have moved on, particularly medical knowledge. When we think of that, we need to remember that Governments do not control the pace of technological advance. I can remember 1942 and the excitement of the Beveridge report. We were then relatively poor; now we are relatively rich. Today, civil servants—like those who formed Beveridge’s team—are at a discount; advisers are at a premium and there are 170,000 registered charities. In today’s circumstances, who will get themselves heard and to whom should we listen?

These are complicated issues. I suppose that examples might include Frank Field. He could reasonably aspire to be a successor to Beveridge. We can then think of some of the institutions whose research and thinking we all admire, and which have been in existence for a considerable period—the King’s Fund on medical matters, the Joseph Rowntree Foundation and the Howard League for Penal Reform. All are notable for their independence. I could add—I hope that I can add—the Church of England to that list. It is, I hope, also notable for its independence. Then there are the media, particularly the weeklies. There is much that we can absorb from their thinking, which is nothing to do with the detailed implementation of particular policies—although these institutions will of course comment upon that. However, they sit somewhat apart from the thrust of day-to-day activity.

Then there is implementation. As the noble Lord, Lord Low of Dalston, said, diversity is a wonderful thing, but it can become a muddle. When thinking about the way in which our social policy should develop, we could, if the right reverend Prelates will forgive me, be rebuilding the tower of Babel.

I offer these final thoughts about those to whom we need to listen. The best people to listen to are those who receive no taxpayers’ money and are genuinely independent. The institutions that I mentioned do not receive significant amounts of taxpayers’ money. Some are involved in small projects for which they are paid public money, but, in general, they are private and independent. I include among them university departments as well as the philosophers—even the unpopular ones; of course Mr Scruton immediately comes to mind—and the writers of today. They are the successors to Dickens, Orwell and TS Eliot.

Second best is when government come into it; they should come in at arm’s length, not with a partnership but with a contract, with clear terms of reference and transparent accountability. You cannot expect the state to act in the way that the Oxford English Dictionary defines a partnership, whereby you share equally in the profits and liabilities. I am sorry, but the state is not on for that. When the liabilities become too great, it will change the rules. Therefore, a much tougher relationship between the state and civil society, in which civil society stands up for itself and negotiates its side of each and every bargain, will serve us much better.