Scotland: Draft Legislation

Lord Forsyth of Drumlean Excerpts

Thursday 22nd January 2015 Lords Chamber

[Lord Forsyth of Drumlean (Con)]

My Lords, I thank my noble and learned friend for repeating the Statement. He said that this is what the people of Scotland voted for, but it is certainly not what I voted for. I regard it less as a milestone; it is probably more likely to be a tombstone for the United Kingdom if we continue in this way by making piecemeal constitutional reform.

I wish to ask my and learned noble friend about the draft clauses in a constructive manner. Clause 4 introduces the extraordinary new concept of a “super-majority”, whereby matters can be passed by the Scottish Parliament only by a two-thirds majority. That includes, according to the draft clause,

“the persons entitled to vote as electors at an election for membership of the Parliament”.

As I understand it, we have just given the Scottish Parliament the power to alter the election franchise for 16 year-olds. Before the ink is even dry on this, we are already changing it. Why are we introducing this concept of a two-thirds majority being required to alter,

“the number of constituencies … the number of regions …the number of regional members”,

and,

“the systems by which members of the Parliament”,

are to be introduced? Is that going to apply to Westminster and the Welsh Assembly? This is a huge constitutional innovation. What is the justification for it?

To reflect the points made by the noble Lord, Lord McAvoy, why is there nothing in these draft clauses that sets out how the Barnett formula funding will be affected by the implementation of these powers? Surely that has to be there in primary legislation so that there is no question about how that will operate. As to the narrative on the paper, all that it says about funding is that,

“the Scottish Government’s Barnett-based block grant will be reduced to reflect the tax revenues that the UK Government will forgo as a result of devolution”.

What on earth does that mean?

[Lord Wallace of Tankerness]

My Lords, picking up on that final point, it means what it says: if there is devolution of income tax, which we are proposing to implement, the UK Government—the Revenue and the Treasury—will not receive the income tax receipts from Scotland on earned income and therefore the block grant will be reduced accordingly. That will be indexed. Box 1 on page 29 of the Command Paper describes how this is intended to work in terms of what we have already passed with regard to the Scottish rate of income tax under the 2012 Act. The noble Lord will see how it is intended to work with regard to the proposal that Parliament has already passed, one that can proceed for income tax as a whole and, indeed, for other taxes.

With regard to the two-thirds majority, it is not such a novel procedure as my noble friend suggests, because, although I suspect that he opposes it, it was nevertheless passed by this House when it introduced the Fixed-term Parliaments Act early in this Parliament with regard to any early general elections that might be called in the other place. We are actually implementing what the noble Lord, Lord Smith of Kelvin, recommended, which is that for matters as fundamental as the franchise, the number of constituencies and the electoral system we will provide “an adequate check”, as he put it in his commission’s report, on the Scottish Parliament. After all, it is a unicameral Parliament and a Government of a single party should not ride roughshod over the interests of other parties on a simple majority and completely change the electoral system. That is why the commission believed that on matters as fundamental as that, given that that power is being transferred from this Parliament to the Scottish Parliament, there ought be an adequate safeguard—and that safeguard is a two-thirds super-majority.