King’s Speech

Lord Anderson of Ipswich Excerpts

Tuesday 23rd July 2024 Lords Chamber

[Lord Anderson of Ipswich (CB)]

My Lords, I add my voice of welcome to the noble and learned Lord, Lord Hermer, whose fine reputation at the Bar precedes him. I believe he will be a worthy successor as Attorney-General to Victoria Prentis MP, one of the unsung heroes of the last Parliament, who is sadly missed from this one.

It is the time of year when newspapers publish lists of good reading for the beach. The Future of Democracy in the UK, published by the Constitution Unit in November 2023, is inexplicably omitted from those lists. It is a three-year project, based on a citizens’ assembly and two YouGov surveys of 4,000 people. On the big-ticket constitutional issues—proportional representation, an elected House of Lords—public opinion was unremarkably split.

What is truly striking is the strength of support revealed by these surveys for reforms that are often—wrongly, it would seem—dismissed as “Westminster bubble” issues. On ethics and integrity, there was over- whelming support for independent regulators of ministerial conduct to support the role of Parliament in enforcing the rules. On Commons scrutiny, twice as many people thought that Parliament, rather than the Government, should have the main responsibility for deciding what Parliament discusses and when it does so. On skeleton Bills and statutory instruments, 79% of respondents believed that Parliament should always need to consider and approve changes in the law, with only 4% disagreeing —Lord Judge would certainly approve.

I shall not venture into Lords reform, or even into the devolution debate, so aptly promoted first by the noble Lord, Lord Wallace, and then by the noble Lord, Lord Bruce. I will put to the Minister five proposals which, though formulated by experts, are in tune with the popular longing for ethical governance revealed by this report and others.

I begin with the November 2021 report, Standards Matter 2, of the Committee on Standards in Public Life. The committee wrote:

“Perhaps the most important element of a regulator’s independence is its statutory basis. Those regulators which exist solely as the creation of the executive are potentially liable to be abolished or compromised with ease”.


Does the Minister, whom I also welcome to his seat, agree with the Committee on Standards in Public Life that the independent adviser, the Public Appointments Commissioner and ACOBA, or their successors, should be put into statute, along with the codes they oversee? If so, I commend to him my public service, integrity and ethics Bill—unlucky in the ballot but as pertinent as ever.

Secondly, to echo the noble and learned Lord, Lord Thomas, next week marks the 125th anniversary of a speech by Augustine Birrell KC MP, in which he deprecated what he called

“the new fashion of legislation by way of skeleton”.—[Official Report, Commons, 1/8/1899; col. 1072.]

The Attorney-General has said encouraging things about this. Have the Government had a chance to look at the Hansard Society’s thoughtful suggestions for addressing the excessive use of skeleton Bills and delegated powers? These include a “Concordat on Legislative Delegation” and a new Act of Parliament to ensure that Parliament, with the help of sifting committees,

“can calibrate the level of scrutiny to the content”

of a statutory instrument.

Thirdly, do the Government favour an expansion of the lobbying register beyond just consultant lobbyists, or, as the Public Administration and Constitutional Affairs Committee of the Commons recommended in May, is it more important to ensure that departmental transparency declarations are issued more regularly, consolidated, and widened to cover contacts with special advisers and informal lobbying by phone and WhatsApp?

Fourthly, the Law Commission concluded in 2020 that the common-law offence of misconduct in public office provides neither the certainty nor the

“clarity that the criminal law demands, and is … prone to error, misuse and abuse”.

Will the Government look at the replacement clauses proposed by the Law Commission, and are they committed to catching fully what the United Nations Convention against Corruption describes as “trading in influence”, “abuse of functions” and “illicit enrichment”?

Fifthly, few of us in this House, I suspect, would like to see a written constitution, still less one whose enforcement is entrusted to the judges, but a political constitution needs a political centre of gravity. Does the Minister see merit in the suggestions of the final report of the Review of the UK Constitution, published by the Institute for Government and the Bennett Institute in September last year? The review proposed a new Parliamentary Joint Committee on the constitution, supported by an independent office for the constitution. A similar idea was floated by no less an authority than my noble friend Lord Hennessy in his book The Bonfire of the Decencies.

The noble Lord, Lord Lisvane, has famously said that “expensive noises” are coming from our constitutional engine, but if it can be properly serviced, it should keep us going for many years yet.