Cabinet Office: Constitution Committee Report

Baroness Quin Excerpts

Tuesday 6th July 2010 Lords Chamber

[Baroness Quin]

My Lords, it is a great pleasure to follow the speech of the noble Lord, Lord Bichard, and his reflective comments with which I had a great measure of agreement. I am also very glad to be able to say a few words about this report as a former member of the Constitution Committee who participated in the work that led to it being formulated. I join other members in taking the opportunity to say how good it was to work with members of the committee and to pay my own tribute to the outgoing chairman not only for the efficiency with which he always chaired our proceedings but for his considerable good humour. It caused the meetings to be interesting and full of often amusing and entertaining anecdotes as members drew on their considerable experience when considering issues such as those contained in the report.

When we have these reports, they are often dominated by members of the committee. That is not entirely the case on this occasion, but it always allows committee members to stand back and reflect on the outcome of their work as a whole in a way that is not always possible when you are going through the details of a report in committee. From that perspective, I think the debates are extremely valuable.

Given some of the comments that have been made, it is fair to say that the background to the report was the concerns that had been expressed inside and outside Parliament about the centralisation of government and the worries that we could be moving to a presidential system rather than a prime ministerial one and moving away from our traditional system of collective Cabinet decision-making and responsibility. From the evidence that was given to the committee and from my experience in Parliament as a parliamentarian and as a Minister under the previous Government, I think that a lot of those fears are somewhat exaggerated. There have been fears of an elective dictatorship—I think the phrase was coined in the 1970s—and of growing presidentialism for a long time. As many members pointed out, there are certain pressures in the system that seem to push in that direction. The emergence of the open question at Prime Minister’s Questions—meaning that the Prime Minister is increasingly called on to answer on virtually all areas of policy—makes me, like the noble Lord, Lord Shaw, hanker back to the days of Prime Minister Attlee who would apparently say in answer to a question, “Don’t ask me. That’s a matter for the Home Secretary” or whichever Minister was responsible.

However, those pressures are with us and continue to operate. As other members have pointed out, they have been supplemented by the pressure from the media, particularly from television, which tends to focus visually on the leaders of parties in a way that we saw very vividly during the recent general election campaign. As the noble Lord, Lord Shaw, pointed out, these days, Prime Ministers tend to get very heavily involved in foreign policy simply because of their attendance at EU summits, G8 meetings and so on. I accept that the pressures exist. I also accept the point made by the noble Lord, Lord Butler, that in response to those pressures it is possible to create a rather messy structure and, in that sense, the report of the Constitution Committee is valuable in trying to look at some of those intricacies. However, at the same time, I do not believe that there is a deliberate attempt to create a presidential system in Britain. It is a danger because of the pressures, but it is not something that Prime Minister Blair or previous Prime Ministers actively espoused. On the contrary, there is still a very strong belief in the traditional virtues of our Cabinet government.

The system is elastic in many ways. It changes depending on the nature of the Prime Minister, on the nature of the Prime Minister’s political situation—whether or not that Prime Minister has a big parliamentary majority—and partly on the Prime Minister’s personality. In some ways, there were similarities between the style of the Thatcher Administration and that of the Blair Administration. Both Prime Ministers were very much bolstered by very big parliamentary majorities.

On the other hand, in between those two premierships we had the premiership of John Major. Many people commented during our inquiry that his was a very collective approach to government, although I am not sure that we would put it quite as the current Justice Secretary put it when he said, “It was frightfully collective, allowing people to talk and talk until the last dissenter came on board”.

Even the careers of strong Prime Ministers might end when they lose the confidence not necessarily of the electorate but of their colleagues in Parliament. Many of us who remember the dramatic exit from the Prime Minister’s office of Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher remember that very vividly indeed. While Prime Minister Blair’s career did not end in entirely the same way, there was a feeling among colleagues that there needed to be change. That was an important aspect of it.

I took slight issue with my good colleague on the committee, the noble Lord, Lord Norton of Louth, when he talked about Ministers being seen perhaps simply as an agent of central government under the Blair Administration. As a Minister in departments at that time, that was certainly not my experience. The loyalty to departments was very strong, and although one might be very much aware of his view on particular issues, that did not always mean that his view or the view from the centre prevailed. An interesting example of that was given to us in evidence by a former Home Secretary, David Blunkett, who described how officials, and sometimes political advisers from No. 10, would attend departmental meetings and would very often “go native”—his words—as a result. The balance between the departments and the Prime Minister is not always as it has been caricatured. I agree very strongly with the committee that accountability is important, and that any change that seems to occur to structures at the centre should be mirrored by a corresponding accountability to Parliament.

I am perhaps less cynical about the creation of the Liaison Committee in the House of Commons, which tests the Prime Minister very thoroughly in the twice-yearly grillings that last several hours and that allow committee chairmen from across the spectrum of policy—on behalf of their colleagues in the committee, too—every opportunity to put the Prime Minister under searching scrutiny. I was struck by the evidence that was given to us by the former Justice Secretary Jack Straw. He talked about how he hardly ever had to accompany Barbara Castle to committee grillings when he was a political adviser in the 1970s, but how as a Minister and as a Cabinet Minister he went weekly or fortnightly to committees either of your Lordships' House or indeed to committees of the House of Commons to answer questions, and indeed subject himself to rigorous scrutiny, sometimes for hours at a time.

I definitely do not think that there was a golden age and that somehow things suddenly went wrong in recent years. There is a great deal of continuity, as well as a certain amount of change, in the way in which the system works. I would not go as far as the noble Lord, Lord Heseltine, did when giving evidence to us. On page 109 of our report, he says:

“Watersheds—I should be the Vicar of Bray; nothing changes except the titles on the doors”.

There have been changes, and the committee was right to highlight some of them. None the less, Ministers and the Prime Minister have many avenues of accountability that ensure that they are held to account.

The report is right to preach the virtues and the importance both of accountability to Parliament and of Parliament’s vigilance in this respect. The report very much reinforces the message that ensuring that Governments of all persuasions are properly and thoroughly held to account is vital. While I am not a supporter of the coalition Government, I wish them well in taking forward the task of Cabinet government. They are unlikely, as the previous Government were, to turn to a presidential system, but will retain the elements of parliamentary democracy and Cabinet responsibility that we all rightly think are very important.