King’s Speech

Baroness Finn Excerpts

Tuesday 23rd July 2024 Lords Chamber

[Baroness Finn (Con)]

My Lords, it is a pleasure to speak after the noble Lord, Lord Burns. I declare my interest as a member of the Committee on Standards in Public Life. I offer my congratulations to the Benches opposite and to the Prime Minister on a great election victory. I too congratulate the noble and learned Lord, Lord Hermer—it is always good to welcome a fellow Welshman—and my noble friend Lord Booth on their excellent maiden speeches.

It is in our common interest as a nation that the newly elected Government are successful in their ambitions to reform the delivery of public services. Thirteen years ago, my noble friend Lord Maude of Horsham established the Government Digital Service to try to do precisely that. Although private enterprise had bequeathed us the touchscreen mobile phone and nascent 4G data technology, most interactions between the citizen and the state still took place through paper forms and face-to-face appointments. The gulf between private sector technological achievements and the success of the Government in harnessing those achievements was vast. Those analogue practices are, fortunately, largely confined to history; the Government today can offer almost all of their services digitally. The furlough and energy support schemes are both testament to government’s capability to deliver.

Today’s Government face the far greater challenge of how to harness artificial intelligence for the benefit of us all. Although I look forward to scrutinising the Government’s proposals for AI when they emerge, I wish to make two brief points based on my own experience. The first is that all technological revolutions are inherently labour displacing. Government must resist the temptation to protect incumbents at the expense of the insurgents. The second is that, if the Government wish to ride the wave of a technological revolution, they must be prepared, as with the GDS, to disrupt the established structures within the Civil Service, identify the skill sets in the private sector, persuade those people to come into the heart of the state and then properly empower them to deliver.

I will use my remaining time to make three short observations on other parts of the gracious Speech. First, although this is not in the Speech, the Labour Party’s manifesto includes a commitment to an independent ethics commission, a function largely undertaken and supported at present by the propriety and ethics directorate within the Cabinet Office. That directorate has been persistently and publicly drawn into areas of significant political controversy. Indeed, the director-general was only last week in the newspapers again. I look forward to the Government setting out further details of their plans, but I encourage the new Prime Minister neither to abrogate his autonomy to determine when and whether a Minister has breached the Ministerial Code, nor to blur the lines of accountability to Parliament.

Secondly, the gracious Speech stated that the Government have several ambitions for updating the UK’s devolution settlement, including a new council of the nations and regions. Although I welcome better co-operation between our nations’ Governments and Executives, I urge the new Government to resist any temptation to place these innovations on a statutory basis. Political decisions are best taken by politicians, not judges, and placing these initiatives on a statutory footing may serve only to invite further judicial erosion of the operative efficiency of government.

Finally, I note the Government’s commitment to introduce a statutory duty of candour for public servants. I applaud the motivation behind this but question whether it is necessary or likely to succeed. For civil servants, the Civil Service Code, which features honesty and integrity as core pillars, is already on a statutory footing. Despite this, the Post Office inquiry and the recent report of the Infected Blood Inquiry have exposed the reprehensible conduct of some officials. In the latter case, the report concluded that civil servants had deliberately destroyed evidence relevant to legal proceedings. It is worrying that even the Cabinet Secretary revealed to the Covid inquiry that he had lost evidence that he was supposed to have produced. The law can take us only so far. Those responsible for such failings need to be held properly to account.

On all these proposed reforms, which are not in the main party-political, the best chance of successful implementation comes with cross-party consultation and agreement. I hope the Minister will be able to give assurances that this will happen.