Strathclyde Review

Lord Balfe Excerpts

Wednesday 13th January 2016 Lords Chamber

[Lord Balfe (Con)]

My Lords, I begin by welcoming the maiden speeches of our two new Members. I have not been privileged to know the noble Lord, Lord Darling, who was in a different establishment from me. But I served in the same Parliament as the noble Baroness, Lady Bowles, who was a very widely respected United Kingdom chair of one of its committees. In the European Parliament, many people look and say, “What country are you from?” and not “What party are you from?”. She represented our country admirably during her period as chair. I am afraid that that is about the only thing I am going to say that is not controversial.

First, it is no use having a House of Lords if it cannot defeat the Government. Secondly, I did not contribute to the debate on 26 October but I sat through it. I have to say to noble Lords on this side that not only did we lose the vote, we also lost the argument. The noble Baroness, Lady Hollis, deployed her arguments extremely effectively and legitimately. Paragraph 2.4 of the report of the noble Lord, Lord Strathclyde, states that the 2006 committee,

“concluded that ‘the House of Lords should not regularly reject Statutory Instruments, but that in exceptional circumstances it might be appropriate for it to do so’ … A number of specific circumstances were identified, for example, when the provisions of an SI were of the sort more normally found in primary legislation or in the case of certain specific orders”.

There are three areas in that where this vote was justified. First, the House does not regularly reject; it does that very seldom. Secondly, there were exceptional circumstances and the fact that the whole issue was withdrawn by the Chancellor is a pretty clear indication of that. Finally, surely expenditure of this level should be in primary legislation.

There has been a mission creep in SIs over the years. They are seen as a very convenient way for the Minister to get something put through the Commons where, as someone has said, the first reaction of any MP to being put on the SI committee is, “Why me?” and the second is, “How long do I have to stay here?”. The SI procedure needs looking at. It is not the reference as to how we deal with it in this House; it is the whole procedure and the way in which this mission creep has allowed SIs to get a place in the British constitution and law making that they were never intended to have.

I am reluctantly in favour of option 3 as a starting point. Above all, if we are to change the regulations, we have to have consensus. Having been in both major parties, I am always conscious that one day the positions will be reversed. We have to make the democracy of this House work. In other words, we cannot say, “We have a majority today and we are going to run away with it”. Whatever way option 3 is developed, we have to have a consensus broadly across the House.

Going back to what I said as regards the Lords having to be able to defeat the Commons, for 10 years in the European Parliament I was fortunate to have a job which took me around the Community on behalf of the Parliament. I can claim to have been in every Chamber of every Parliament in the original 15 member states, before the big enlargement of 2004. Whatever our defects may be, there is great admiration for the fact that the House of Lords is seen as an independent and an intellectually credible Chamber. I do not want to get into trouble with too many embassies, but if noble Lords look at a number of other Chambers, the Irish Chamber is completely tribal, to the point where, if the elections for the second Chamber produce the wrong result, the Prime Minister can top up the second Chamber to give the Government a majority.

[Noble Lords]

Oh!

[Lord Balfe]

That would be a nice thing, would it not? The German upper House has very circumscribed powers. It basically looks after the Länder. It divides its powers with the lower House. It has very little say in the way the federal republic is run, other than within its circumscribed limits. The French upper House is a body of people who are largely delegates from their regional authorities. We all know how that happens: “Pierre is the leader and Françoise, she’s the number two, and we must give the committee on education to so-and-so”. Then they get to the end of the list and say, “Christ, we’ve got to send someone to Paris. Oh, I know: Jean-Marie has been a really good servant of this House and he does like travel, you know”.

There is no perfect way to construct a second Chamber, but we have one. It is a valuable second Chamber. We have to safeguard our rights, one of which is to say to the people down the corridor, “You’ve got it wrong”. If we ever said it at the right time, it was on 26 October, when we said to them, “You’ve got it wrong”, and what did they do? They agreed with us and actually withdrew it. Let us not lose sight of the fact that the vote was followed by decisive government action that basically accepted that this Chamber was right, even though I was, as ever, in the wrong Lobby.