Strathclyde Review

Eleanor Laing Excerpts

Thursday 17th December 2015 Commons Chamber

[Chris Bryant (Rhondda) (Lab)]

I am grateful to the Leader of the House for giving me advance notice of his statement, which I received in exemplary fashion before 10 o’clock this morning.

I am afraid that this has all the hallmarks of government by fit of pique. The Leader of the House says that the review was set up “after constitutional questions were raised about the primacy of this elected House of Commons”. What utter tosh! The only people who were raising constitutional questions were the Prime Minister, the Chancellor and the Leader of the House himself, who were stamping their little feet because they had not got their way. There were protests, yes, but people were not protesting against the Lords. They were protesting against the Government’s miserly attempt to cut working tax credits. The truth is that this is payback time. It has absolutely nothing to do with principle. Maybe the Leader of the House is still smarting from losing more votes in the House of Lords as a Minister than any other Minister in the last Parliament—24 in all, or a quarter of the total number of lost votes.

The most astonishing thing, however, is how Lord Strathclyde has done an about-turn. In 1999, when in opposition, he said of the convention that the House of Lords did not strike down statutory instruments:

“I declare this convention dead.”

But now he wants to resurrect it. There’s a word for that. Between 2001 and 2010, when Lord Strathclyde was Leader of the Opposition in the House of Lords, he led his colleagues through the Division Lobby to defeat the Labour Government 390 times, including once on a fatal motion on a statutory instrument. Now he thinks that that is a disgraceful way to behave. There’s a word for that.

This was meant to be all about the financial privilege of the House of Commons, but can the Leader of the House confirm that the review makes no distinction whatever between secondary legislation where financial privilege is concerned and any other form of secondary legislation? In essence, the Government are seeking to stop the Lords having any right to oppose any secondary legislation, whatever they might put through in it.

Does the Leader of the House accept that the other problem with secondary legislation is that because it is unamendable, each House is simply asked to say aye or no, content or not content? So ping-pong does not make any kind of sense. The report does not make sense, either. It seems to imagine a statutory instrument being sent back to the Commons, but the two Houses have completely distinct processes for deciding on secondary legislation. Every piece of secondary legislation that is now advanced depends on a parent Act. Each of them specifies whether the regulations shall be subject to the affirmative or negative decision process and whether there has to be a vote in one or both Houses before coming into force. Are the Government really intending retrospective amendment of each one of these Acts of Parliament? There is a simple answer to this problem: use less secondary legislation and only use secondary legislation for non-contentious matters—do not use it for significant matters that dramatically affect households in this country.

The House of Lords is far from perfect—the Prime Minister has packed it with 240 new Members, doing so faster than any Prime Minister in history—but surely it would be wrong to deal with aspects of the powers and the role of the Lords without considering its composition. Is it not time we had a constitutional convention and proper, thoroughgoing reform? There is a pattern here: the Government have changed the voting rights in this House; they have curtailed the rights of trade unions and voluntary organisations to campaign; they have made it more difficult for the poor and the young to register; and today we learn that they have increased the number of Conservative special advisers from 74 to 96, costing an additional £1.6 million a year, even as they want to cut the support for Opposition scrutiny of this Government by 20%. Where there is dissent, they crush it. Where a body opposes them, they neuter it. That is not a Conservative Government, respectful of the constitution, dutiful in their dealings with their opponents, cautious in advancing radical change and determined to govern for the whole nation. It is not a Conservative Government; in the words of one of their former leaders, Disraeli, it is an “organised hypocrisy”.

[Madam Deputy Speaker (Mrs Eleanor Laing)]

Order. The hon. Gentleman knows that I will not allow him to use that word that he has just used—the very last one.

[Chris Bryant]

Those were words used by Disraeli in this House. I am not maintaining that any Member has acted hypocritically, but I am saying that this set of proposals is an organised hypocrisy.

[Madam Deputy Speaker]

I accept what the hon. Gentleman is saying, but the fact that Disraeli was also wrong does not make him right. I am sure he will find a better way of putting that last sentence he used.

[Chris Bryant]

Well, Madam Deputy Speaker, what word would you use for it? Let me make it absolutely clear that I am not imputing any sense of dishonourableness to any hon. Member of this House or any other House, but I am saying that the Government are trying to get something through the back door and that that is not fundamentally, for the Government, an honest way of behaving.

[Madam Deputy Speaker]

I accept that the hon. Gentleman is not impugning any Member of this House, so for the moment I will let him away with it.

[Chris Grayling]

It does not feel as though we are trying to move anything through the back door, given that I am standing in front of the House making a statement and setting out a report that has been prepared with a number of options for the Government to consider and undoubtedly for this House to debate before any legislative change could happen—if legislative change were to be adopted as a result of this report. There is a degree of faux outrage from the other side on this matter.

Let us be clear about what happens. This House has an elected mandate, unlike the House of Lords. Our majority Government have a democratic mandate to implement our manifesto, and that is what we have sought to do. The conventions that have guided the relationship between the House of Lords and the House of Commons have existed for a very long time, and they have indeed broken down over many years. The Government’s view is that it is time to re-establish a framework for the relationship between the two Houses which reflects the fact that this is the elected House of Commons. That is the purpose of the report, and it sets out three options for all of us to consider. Of course it makes specific reference to the issue of financial matters. The Commons has had primacy over financial matters for centuries; there are already Commons-only statutory instruments on financial matters. What occurred this autumn was the first time that a financial matter that had come before the House of Lords had been rejected—it was the first time a fatal motion had been used. Over the previous decades there had been hardly any fatal motions on SIs. On reading this report—I again thank Lord Strathclyde for his work—it is my view that in many respects it gives the Lords a clearer and broader role in the consideration of secondary legislation, while also making it clear that ultimately the democratically elected Chamber has to have the final say.

When the shadow Leader of the House talks about using less secondary legislation and about the composition of the House of Lords, I simply look back to my first few years in this House, and indeed yours, Madam Deputy Speaker, given that you were first elected in 1997, and I can say that I have no memory of a shortage of SIs being brought forward under the Labour Governments. I also have no memory of a shortage of appointments by Tony Blair of his friends and cronies to the House of Lords over an extended period, so I will take no lessons from Labour Members.