Public Bodies Bill [HL]

Lord Faulkner of Worcester Excerpts

Tuesday 9th November 2010 Lords Chamber

[Lord Faulkner of Worcester]

My Lords, given the lateness of the hour, I shall say less than I would have done had my name appeared earlier on the speakers list. However, I start by thanking the Minister for his good humour and patience in our debate today and for the meeting that he convened for all Peers interested in this Bill last Wednesday. I am not quite sure what he expected from that meeting but it was a remarkable occasion. Virtually every noble Lord who attended, while supporting the principle that non-departmental public bodies which had outlived their usefulness should be wound up or merged with others, expressed outrage at the way that the interests of Parliament and of the ordinary citizen are being sacrificed in this Bill. The Minister heard, over and again, complaints about the almost complete lack of consultation. Bodies which have served the community well, without a breath of scandal attached to them, which were seen by those who deal with them daily as helpful and supportive, which were in many cases established by an Act of Parliament after extensive debate in this House and in another place, and which were fulfilling a role which cannot be performed as cost-effectively or efficiently by others are all being tossed on to a bonfire with little more than a sentence in a departmental press release.

Those views, expressed at last week's meeting, are put even more strongly in the report of the Constitution Committee, which many noble Lords have referred to today. Let us consider some things that the committee says. “They”—that is, the Government—

“are pushing at the boundaries of the constitutional principle that only Parliament may amend or repeal primary legislation”.

The conclusion in paragraph 14 was:

“The Public Bodies Bill … is concerned with the design, powers and functions of a vast range of public bodies, the creation of many of which was the product of extensive parliamentary debate and deliberation. We fail to see why such parliamentary debate and deliberation should be denied to proposals now to abolish or to redesign such bodies”.

It really will not do, my Lords. The powers being taken by Ministers in this Bill to close down, to merge or to move organisations into partnerships with others go far beyond anything we have seen in legislation before. To claim, as the Minister did at last week’s meeting, that we need not worry because individual decisions on particular public bodies will all be subject to the scrutiny of this House, because they are to go through the affirmative order procedure, completely ignores the point that there is a long-standing convention in this House that we do not vote against statutory instruments.

I well remember, of course, that the noble Lord’s new friends on the Liberal Democrat Benches had no such reservations about that in the previous Parliament, or indeed in the two before that, but they voted against statutory instruments secure in the knowledge that their chances of winning such a vote were remote, because the Conservative Front Bench steadfastly and consistently refused to support them. Honestly, the Minister’s offer of a draft statutory instrument—a constitutional novelty, in my view—sounds little more to me than offering a condemned man the choice of hanging or execution by the electric chair. The decision had already been taken by the time that the statutory instrument had been produced and, as a result, would be a formality.

I was going to make a speech about a public body in which I have a particular interest and which I had the honour to chair until 2009, standing down when I became a Minister in the Government Whips’ Office: the Railway Heritage Committee. It is a body which has a link with Henry VIII because, as your Lordships may recall, Benjamin Disraeli predicted as long ago as 1845, in his novel Sybil, that the railways will do as much for mankind as the monasteries did. This is a debate which I want to have on another occasion and in Committee with the Minister.

However, I make the point now that that is a committee with a budget that costs the taxpayer little more than £100,000 a year. That can be reduced further, but that budget would have to be enhanced because the National Railway Museum will in future have to spend at least that amount of money on buying the artefacts and records which, at present, it gets for nothing. It is staffed entirely by volunteers—there is only one paid employee—and works with the grain of the railway industry and the heritage railway section. It was established by three separate Acts of Parliament, two passed by Conservative Governments and one, most recently, by the Labour Government in 2006. It is a body which fulfils the functions that were set out by the Minister standing at the Conservative Dispatch Box in 1996, to the letter, and has never attracted any criticism or scandal. It was abolished, or at least it is facing abolition, as the result of a single sentence in a Department for Transport press release, with no consultation whatever. The only warning that the members of the committee and the industry had that something was coming was the leak in the Daily Telegraph on 23 September. As a consequence of that, over 30 individuals, ranging from some very high-profile in international organisations—the Heritage Railway Association itself, the Keeper of the Records of Scotland, Sir William McAlpine and others—all wrote to the Minister begging her to think again before including it in the list for abolition. To no avail, though; that organisation is in Schedule 1 of the Bill. I hope that it will be possible, when we get into Committee, to do something about this deplorable state of affairs and that we can do something that recognises the importance of railway heritage in the tourist sector and in the economy more generally.

I do not want to speak any more tonight other than to say that I hope that my noble friend’s amendment will meet with approval in the House. It is important that we have more time to look at these proposals and redress, at least to some extent, the scandalous lack of consultation that has led to the Bill in its present form.