Democracy Denied (DPRRC Report)

Baroness Fox of Buckley Excerpts

Thursday 12th January 2023 Lords Chamber

[Baroness Fox of Buckley (Non-Afl)]

My Lords, I thank both committees for these excellent reports. What is more, I thank them for making them readable. The DPRRC apologises for its report being full of parliamentary nomenclature and technical procedural explanations like some “esoteric constitutional essay”. However, I thank the committees for their clarity and making the opaque accessible. The start of chapter 2 of Democracy Denied?, explaining terms such as “Henry VIII powers” and “skeleton legislation”, is invaluable, and, in the spirit of the contribution of the noble Viscount, Lord Stansgate, I will be recommending both reports as must-reads far beyond Westminster.

I especially commend the committee consciously aiming to make the report comprehensible to the public. As the noble Lord, Lord Blencathra, explained, the issues raised are anything but esoteric and affect the freedoms and rights of every single person in this country. However, the public are not just objects of law changes; that is too passive a depiction. The report details a worrying shift in the balance of power. Evidence of the Executive’s power-grab is compelling, but when we demand that the Government be accountable to Parliament, we must also stress that Parliament needs to be accountable to the public. Too often in recent years the demos, the foundation of democracy, have felt that parliamentarians sometimes refuse to act on their wishes. If the Government promise the public that they will, for example, act to control borders but when they attempt to act the public see parliamentarians trying to block that action, does that not give the moral high ground argument to the Executive to breach convention to push through publicly supported laws? That is a warning to this unelected House about indulging in overreach, acting more as an Opposition than as a scrutineer, and using every tactic in the book to fight laws it does not like, even if the electorate do.

As we heard from the noble Lord, Lord Prentis of Leeds, in his impressive maiden speech, outside this House there is a growing visceral distrust of Parliament per se. Conversely, I agree with the report’s concerns that when laws are delegated, the public are done a disservice and in turn are confused when some laws sail through without parliamentary challenge. An example already mentioned was when in lockdown the Government scandalously made it mandatory for anyone working in a care home to be fully vaccinated or be sacked. This happened with no risk analysis of the cost-benefit impact on the care sector, and there was nothing parliamentarians could do about it. Some 40,000 care workers were driven out of their jobs then, and now almost daily we hear discussed the crisis of care worker shortages and never acknowledge how bad lawmaking contributed to this disastrous state of affairs. No wonder the public are confused and disillusioned. This is why it is so important to shine a light on anti-democratic lawmaking processes. The shocking use of disguised legislative instruments should, in fact, be front page news.

I have a couple of thoughts on solutions. In the reports, Permanent Secretaries claim that increased use of statutory instruments is due to the competition for parliamentary time. Is not the solution here obvious? There should be fewer laws. To the Minister, I repeat the question posed by Lord Simon in a 1990 debate:

“to ask Her Majesty’s Government whether they will reduce the quantity and improve the quality of legislation.”—[Official Report, 31/1/1990; col. 382.]

I suggest that lawmaking has become a technocratic substitute for political leadership. Is this because politicians lack the imagination or moral courage to try to persuade citizens of the need for social change and instead rely on the law to compel it? So many laws feel unnecessary and performative—headline-grabbing responses to demands that something must be done.

As we enter Report stage on the Public Order Bill, we have, as many noble Lords have noted, a statute book full of legislation that could deal with the egregious aspects of modern protest tactics. The problem is that they are not being enforced, and more laws will not solve this problem.

By the way, the enthusiasm for creating new laws to tackle all and every issue is not just a weakness of the Conservative Administration. Often, the Opposition’s main demands on Government are even more laws, if different ones, or myriad amendments so detailed that they could constitute new laws in their own right.

On time constraints, why are so many Bills such enormous, complex, impenetrable tomes, containing everything bar the kitchen sink? Is this the attempt of politicians to micromanage every conceivable aspect of the public’s autonomous choices because they do not trust the voters? Such expansive Bills are often far removed from their original intent. The Online Safety Bill is a case in point: once conceived narrowly but importantly as protecting children, now so huge it represents an existential threat to the free speech of adults. This is a crisis not just of democracy but of our freedoms.