Sewel Convention
Drew Hendry Excerpts(6 years, 5 months ago)
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Tommy Sheppard (Edinburgh East) (SNP)
It is important in this debate that we distinguish between competences, which are a list of nominal responsibilities, and power, which is the ability to exercise change in those particular areas. I have no doubt in my mind that we are in the middle of a process that is seeing a major transfer of power from the devolved authorities of the United Kingdom to the centre. I caution the hon. Member for Edinburgh South (Ian Murray) to look at the detail of what is happening, and not to be seduced by Conservative Members who say, “There is nothing to see here. Move on. Keep calm.”
The truth is that this is happening in two ways. First, a convention that has existed for 20 years is being torn up, which is extremely important because the genesis of the Sewel convention was to give assurance to those who wanted to believe that devolution actually meant something, that power would be exercised by the devolved authorities. The convention was there to say that it was not a matter of the Scottish Parliament making a decision that could be overridden. If we set the precedent where this is reversed, the situation is that it can be at any time in the future.
The second way in which power is being transferred is through the talk of joint arrangements. I am not against having joint arrangements—there are plenty of opportunities where we should be co-ordinating things—but the devil is in the detail and the principles that the Government are putting forward are not fit for purpose. Let me illustrate that with an example. Imagine you have a committee that is to discuss farming policy. On that committee, Scottish farmers will be represented by the Scottish Government and Welsh farmers will be represented by the Welsh Government, but who will represent the interests of English farmers? It will be the United Kingdom Department. I think English farmers should have a say, but I do not think it is fair that the body that advocates for them should also sit as judge and jury if there is a difference of opinion in that committee. That is what is being proposed. That means that every time there is a difference of opinion the smaller party will lose out to the larger one. So if the Scottish Government want to take a policy on genetically modified crops, they could be overridden. If they want to take a policy on weighting subsidies for a cold climate, they could be overridden. On and on there is the opportunity to do that. That is what we mean by a power grab.
I believe in devolution. I tell the right hon. Member for Orkney and Shetland (Mr Carmichael) that I was a member of the Scottish constitutional convention.
Drew Hendry (Inverness, Nairn, Badenoch and Strathspey) (SNP)
My hon. Friend rightly says that he believes in devolution. Are not the actions of the UK Government at the moment just the latest in a long pattern where the Conservatives have been against devolution? They have voted against it at every opportunity.
Tommy Sheppard
That is absolutely the case.
I say to the right hon. Gentleman that I do believe in devolution. I was a member of the Scottish constitutional convention that drew up the proposals, but I, like many people involved at that time, also respect the right of the Scottish people to become a self-governing nation if they so wish. It is disingenuous to say that, just because we support independence, that means that we are not genuine in our desire to protect devolution.
Mr Speaker, I will take your admonishment and I will finish there, even though I have so much more to say.
Oral Answers to Questions
Drew Hendry Excerpts(6 years, 10 months ago)
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Deidre Brock (Edinburgh North and Leith) (SNP)
Drew Hendry (Inverness, Nairn, Badenoch and Strathspey) (SNP)
Gavin Newlands (Paisley and Renfrewshire North) (SNP)
David Mundell
I intend to sit down with the Scottish Government next week to discuss progress on amending clause 11. In relation to further devolution, the Smith Commission determined the nature of the settlement, to which all parties in the Scottish Parliament signed up. This Government do not support changes to the devolution arrangements, as agreed in the Smith Commission.
Drew Hendry
The Secretary of State has failed to answer for his broken promise to this House and to his Tory colleagues in Scotland on clause 11. That means Karren Brady, Sebastian Coe, Joan Bakewell and 26 Church of England bishops now have more say over Scotland’s future than Scotland’s elected MPs. Will the Secretary of State finally apologise for that sad state of affairs?
David Mundell
I am sure the hon. Gentleman’s views and mine on the future of the House of Lords are closer than he would anticipate. I have taken full responsibility for not meeting the timescale I originally set out. We are committed to amending the Bill, and to amending the Bill in agreement with the Scottish Government and the Welsh Assembly Government. I would have thought that that is something even Opposition Members would recognise.
Scotland Bill
Drew Hendry Excerpts(9 years, 4 months ago)
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Mr Rees-Mogg
No, all my amendment is seeking to do is ensure that at the beginning of a new reign the Crown Estates are returned entire. It is about a
“permanent alienation of the rights of the Crown.”
That does not mean that one property may not be sold for another property; it means that the assets must be retained within a single pool and that they must not be disposed of without receiving counter-value in return. It is a permanent alienation of the rights, not of specific properties, which is why I phrased it this way, rather than relating it to specific properties or the seashore or any of the other elements of the Crown Estate. It is about preserving entire that which does not belong to this House to give away. It would be wrong of this House to exceed its authority and risk giving away something that is not its.
I accept that it is highly unlikely that a future sovereign will exercise his right to have the Crown Estates returned to him, but the fact that it is unlikely does not mean that we should abandon property rights lightly.
Amendment 126 addresses the pro rata payments under the Sovereign Grant Act 2011. I was delighted that the First Minister of Scotland was clear that she did not wish to see any reduction in the Sovereign Grant Act. The Crown estates are 3.9% funded from Scotland; that is the percentage of income that comes from the Scottish Crown estates. That feeds through to the 15% that is received by the sovereign to pay their expenses. This would merely provide a protection for that.
Drew Hendry (Inverness, Nairn, Badenoch and Strathspey) (SNP)
The Crown Estate is public land and its commissioners are a statutory corporation, and the Crown Estate revenues are paid directly to the UK Government Treasury. It has no direct role in paying for the Queen or the royal household. Does the hon. Gentleman not agree that that is contrary to the position he is trying to put forward?
Mr Rees-Mogg
No, I do not agree. I enjoyed participating in the Sovereign Grant Act debates, when I thought Her Majesty ought to get rather more than the measly 15% that was being proposed. It is based on the income of the Crown Estates and it is conceivable that if the Crown Estates were managed in a less than efficient way, the total amount raised would be reduced and therefore the grant from the Consolidated Fund would be reduced in a pro rata manner. This amendment is putting in a protection.
Drew Hendry
Does the hon. Gentleman not agree, however, that, as the Chancellor himself has said, there are other mechanisms for paying? The Crown Estate just happens to be one such mechanism.
Mr Rees-Mogg
The Crown Estate was a brilliant way of settling the issue. It is of course just one way, and we have tried other methods, but the civil list, for instance, ended up failing as a method of paying for the Crown because of inflation. It had historically been set for the lifetime of a sovereign and was done once in a reign, but inflation bit into that and the amount granted to the Queen in 1952 became so small 20 years into her reign that it needed to be increased. The great advantage of the Sovereign Grant Act is that it took the detailed petty politics out of ensuring we have a monarchy that is funded to do what we want our monarchy to do.
Alex Salmond
I was objecting not to the outpouring, but to the suggestion from the hon. Gentleman that he had planned this all along—that this was all part of some dastardly scheme he had dreamt up. That stretched our credulity rather too far.
I know that the acronym IPSA—the Independent Parliamentary Standards Authority—is not beloved in this Chamber, and on coming back to this House I can see why. How on earth have Members managed to order their affairs and deal with goodness only knows what over the past few years? IPSA is not beloved, but IPSO—the Independent Press Standards Organisation—should be beloved. Today IPSO, the new self-regulating press arrangement, delivered a humiliating rebuff to The Daily Telegraph. Although it is printed on the front page in microscopic form, none the less there it is on the front page, a full-scale apology to the First Minister of Scotland for the totally erroneous story that was published during the general election campaign, with which some Members of the House are familiar and some are very familiar indeed, concerning her views on which UK Government she preferred.
IPSO is on a winning run and should now pursue those dreadful papers—right-wing bastions such as The Guardian, and those even further right-wing bastions such as The Daily Telegraph, The Times and the Daily Mail, which published such a dreadfully inaccurate story and tried to muddy the waters of this debate about the Crown Estate and cast aspersions on the monarchical loyalties of our First Minister of Scotland.
It is important that the reason for the overwhelming wish to see these matters devolved is a real belief in the island and coastal communities of Scotland that local management of these resources will achieve considerable benefits overall. It is a question not of reducing revenues, but of increasing economic activity. For many years I represented a fishing constituency, and I can tell Members that the Crown Estate has not been a popular institution among many of our fishing communities. Many of our small harbours in particular found the harbour dues on the foreshore extremely onerous. The only victory I can remember was in the town of Gardenstown in Banffshire, where the harbour commissioners were suffering from the imposition of a very substantial bill from the Crown Estate commission.
We were able to discover a royal deed from Charles II, from a time when he had been crowned King of Scots but was still to assert his rightful throne south of the border. He had a fantastic time one night in Gardenstown as he was gathering an army before the battle of Dunbar and as a result, in a fit of generosity, wrote an exemption from all Crown dues. We were able to produce that deed from the 17th century, and Gardenstown harbour, I can report to the House, is free from the imposition of the Crown Estate revenue, but other communities in Scotland have not been as fortunate. Members will therefore understand full well why there is a general desire to see such resources being applied to the economic benefit of local communities.
My final point applies to other clauses that we are debating and particularly to the speech that we heard from the hon. Member for Birmingham, Erdington (Jack Dromey). His idea that the devolution of key aspects of labour relations and wage policy will lead to a diminution of standards does not stand up to any examination of the reality of devolution in Scotland. I pointed out to him that the no compulsory redundancy agreement which, uniquely, the civil service unions have was negotiated by the SNP Government. The pensions benefit that the Fire Brigades Union has—a small benefit in terms of the overall imposition on public sector unions, but none the less a benefit that the union values—happened because the Scottish Government were able to negotiate it. Our nursing community—nurses in the national health service—was mentioned. Nurses last year got a pay rise in Scotland because the Scottish Government followed the recommendations of the pay review, whereas the Government down here did not.
Given that experience and given the fact that the Scottish Government are an accredited living wage employer, the suggestion that people sacrifice those benefits so that the hon. Gentleman can get his uniformity, which he seems to think is crucial across the United Kingdom, would explain why there is a divergence opening up between his views and those of the Scottish Trades Union Congress on how best to achieve progressive change in Scotland.
That is a matter of great current interest, because this week we will discuss the Budget, and one of the issues of greatest importance under discussion will be the diminution of in-work benefits. Thousands of people across all our constituencies face the prospect of a substantial reduction in their standard of living as a result of the course that the Chancellor has set. He says, of course, that he wants to end the situation in which huge subsidies are going to a range of private sector employers. One approach that the Scottish Government might take, were we to have control of the minimum wage legislation, would be to increase the minimum wage quickly to the living wage, thereby reducing in-work benefits through the early increase of wages, as opposed to reducing them before any wage increases are forthcoming, which I think is the fate that is in store for workers across our constituents.
The challenge is therefore twofold. First, Members who believe that the right course of action is to increase the minimum wage towards the living wage, or to see the living wage more generally applied, would like to see that as a prerequisite before in-work benefits are cut. Secondly, with regard to the suitable amendments before the Committee, for Members representing Scottish constituents, and for those who are sympathetic to progressive politics, would it not be safer, given all the evidence to place matters in the hands of the Scottish Parliament and the Scottish Government, to achieve that and protect the living standards of Scottish workers?
Drew Hendry
I rise to support new clause 57. The transfer of the Crown Estate in Scotland and its assets was a key commitment agreed to by the cross-party Smith commission, and I know that the Secretary of State will be keen to deliver it in full. The Heads of Agreement stated, in paragraph 32:
“Responsibility for the management of the Crown Estate’s economic assets in Scotland, and the revenue generated from these assets, will be transferred to the Scottish Parliament. This will include the Crown Estate’s seabed, urban assets, rural estates, mineral and fishing rights, and the Scottish foreshore for which it is responsible.”
We have heard a lot today about the nonsense of connecting payments of the Crown Estate and the royal grant, so I will not go into that. I think it is fair to say that unfortunately we will not be supporting the amendment tabled by the hon. Member for North East Somerset (Mr Rees-Mogg).
The amendment proposed by the hon. Member for Edinburgh South (Ian Murray) has the look of a sensible proposal. Were it not for the Treasury’s approach to the transfer scheme, it might have been worthy of support. However, when put together with the Treasury transfer scheme, it would have the effect of removing from Ministers the ability to exercise management functions, which would be logical and necessary.
The Bill, as it stands, fails to meet the promises of the Smith commission. New clause 57 would reduce the frankly unnecessary complexity of the current arrangements relating to the Crown Estate. By removing the reservation relating to the management of the Crown Estate, it would provide the Scottish Parliament with full legislative competence in relation to the management of the Crown Estate in or as regards Scotland. It would also transfer any functions of the Crown Estate Commissioners in relation to the rights to the continental shelf beyond the 200-mile limit adjacent to Scotland.
If the Government are truly committed to delivering on the promises of the Smith commission, much needs to be done to reduce the level of unnecessary complexity in the Bill. As drafted, it provides for restrictions on the Scottish Parliament’s ability to legislate and for retention of the Crown Estate Act 1961 powers. These carve-outs and powers of direction were not envisaged by the Smith commission. For example, the area of the continental shelf beyond the 200 nautical mile limit, where the Crown Estate has “spill over” responsibilities, is not covered by the proposals.
The Bill also excludes assets not wholly owned by the Crown Estate. The most striking example must be Fort Kinnaird shopping centre in Edinburgh. As I pointed out earlier, the Smith commission agreed that the Crown Estate’s economic assets in Scotland, and the revenue generated from them, would be transferred to the Scottish Parliament, and that specifically included urban assets. To be clear, that is economic assets and urban assets. Fort Kinnaird generates net revenue of up to £8.4 million a year—surely a significant urban asset—yet the Bill seeks to exclude it from transfer on the basis that for the Crown Estate it is not an asset. That is nonsense. The Crown Estate is in a 50:50 partnership with a company called Hercules. The seventh labour of Hercules was to capture the Cretan bull. In this particular piece of mythology that we are debating tonight, it is no Herculean feat to capture the bull contained in this exception. This is an asset. Therefore, to honour the Smith commission agreement, it must be included.
David Mundell
I will not, because I have very little time to comment on all the issues raised in this debate.
I want to comment on a couple of further matters that were raised in relation to the Crown Estate, one of which was about Fort Kinnaird—which, for Members not from Scotland, is a shopping centre in Edinburgh, and apparently a very successful one. The management of the Crown Estate’s wholly and directly owned Scottish assets is what is to be transferred under the transfer scheme. Fort Kinnaird is not wholly and directly owned by the Crown—
Mr Graham Allen (Nottingham North) (Lab)
Before I deal with the amendments and new clauses in my name, I should like to address a few words, through you, Sir David, to the other place. The way in which we are considering this Bill means that a large group of new clauses that try to give real life to the Smith commission proposals will not even be discussed this evening. They would give Scottish local authorities the general power of competence already enjoyed by English local authorities. They also refer to subsidiarity and to devolving power genuinely not just to the Scottish Parliament—of which I am one of the biggest supporters—but to Scottish local government. The new clauses would actually allow local government in Scotland to be constitutionally defined so that no one, either in this place or in the Scottish Parliament, could ever take away the rights and liberties of Scottish local government.
It is a flaw in our legislative process when we are not even allowed to debate those very important issues in our own Parliament. They have not even been dismissed. I very much hope that colleagues in the other place will note that those issues have not had a hearing. I think that many people—democrats from all parties—who were excited about the possibilities of what arose from the referendum and the Smith process will feel that this House has cheated them out of a proper debate on some of the wider issues of devolution.
This is going to happen again on another day, when the English version of devolution will be debased and devalued by a mere rearranging of the EVEL deckchairs in the House of Commons. I think people will live to regret that day, too.
Drew Hendry
As my colleagues have said, the principle of subsidiarity should not stop at local authorities. Does the hon. Gentleman agree that subsidiarity should be about people being able to take control themselves as and when they need to do so?
Mr Allen
I do not wish to be unkind to the hon. Gentleman, but subsidiarity is not stopping at local government in Scotland and many would argue that it is not really started at local government, either. There are many examples of how the Scottish Parliament, over which the hon. Gentleman’s party has majority control—there is no one else to blame—is sucking up powers. That sucking sound we hear from north of the border is the powers going up from local government to Holyrood. On subsidiarity, if it were justiciable, local government and, in fact, any individual, could take the Scottish Government to court if they removed the constitutional powers that I would have suggested had we had time to discuss the new clauses in the next group of amendments, but sadly we are not going to reach them.
Drew Hendry
Has the hon. Gentleman studied the document by the Commission on Strengthening Local Democracy in Scotland? It was a cross-party and civic society exercise in examining how Scotland might go forward. In fact, I as an SNP member was a signatory and co-author of that document and was on the commission.
The Temporary Chair (Sir David Amess)
Order. Before the hon. Member for Nottingham North (Mr Allen) responds to that intervention, I would be grateful if he drew his remarks more closely to the amendments under discussion.
Mr Allen
Again, we can get hung up on the words, and the Office for Budget Responsibility could argue about what “responsibility” means. I am trying to suggest that there should be an independent body that can define some statistical basis for the economic arguments we will all have, whatever our political differences. I think the hon. Member for Inverness, Nairn, Badenoch and Strathspey wished to intervene, but I do not want to disturb him if he is looking at a good game on his PC.
Drew Hendry
I was not looking at a good game, but I thank the hon. Gentleman for allowing me to intervene. I wanted to pick up on the issue of pejorative terms because I do not think they help the debate. However, the hon. Gentleman should feel free to use whatever terms he wants because we will just go on representing Scotland. Perhaps the lessons that should be learned from Scotland are that the Scottish public voted in overwhelming numbers to return 56 SNP MPs and have them stand up and have Scotland’s voice heard, which it clearly is not being.