Common Frameworks (Common Frameworks Scrutiny Committee Report)

Lord Garnier Excerpts

Thursday 2nd February 2023 Lords Chamber

[Lord Garnier (Con)]

My Lords, I shall be brief, because the noble Baroness, Lady Andrews, in her gentle but devastating analysis of our committee’s work and the oversight we gave to the work of the Government in this respect, has essentially said all that needs to be said. But, in that great cliché of Parliament, just because it has been said before does not mean that I will not say it again. However, I adopt entirely what she said.

I too publicly thank the clerks and other staff who assisted us on the committee since we began our work in 2020. For a number of reasons, including career development and staff shortages, we have had several people assist us on the committee; I know I can say without fear of contradiction that all of them demonstrated the intellectual, analytical and administrative skills that have enabled us to interrogate the complex questions that underlie the common frameworks regime and the Government’s management of it.

It is also right to draw your Lordships’ attention to the work of our chairman. Her calm and consensual leadership of the committee, and her ability to restrain the more exasperated members of her team, has been a masterclass. I confess that I am probably the most apoplectic member of the committee, not least because, as a Conservative Peer and a fervent supporter of the union, I have had particular reason to be disappointed by my own Government’s failure to take this subject or the preservation of the union as seriously as I think they should have done.

I fully accept that much of my disappointment goes back to the days when my right honourable friend Mr Boris Johnson was Prime Minister—a political interlude on which I do not intend to dwell—and now that we have a serious-minded, hard-working and assiduous Prime Minister, and the wheels are falling off the Nicola Sturgeon regime, I have every hope that the United Kingdom is in less danger of splitting up. There is, though, no room for complacency, and the political and legislative concerns identified by the noble Baroness, Lady Andrews, must be taken seriously.

The work of this committee is primarily to oversee the policymakers, not the officials. Whereas relations between officials in the four jurisdictions have in the main been professional, productive and workmanlike, that cannot be said of the political relationships between the four Administrations. Much of the political fallout and dissension between the devolved Administrations and the Government here in London could, with good will and mature leadership, have been avoided or dealt with more productively.

Unquestionably—here I gently disagree with the noble Baroness—the name of our committee and the task of ensuring regulatory consistency across the four parts of the United Kingdom do not excite the political juices of many noble Lords. It is probably fair to say that the usual channels have not been overflowing with applicants to join us. If some have been put off by what they think must be the turgid examination of EU directives, or the translation of EU competence over plastic bags into our four jurisdictions, they have been mistaken.

There is an old rule in Whitehall and Westminster that the grander a Minister’s title or uniform, the less power and influence they have. Indeed, it is often possible to get rid of incompetent Ministers only by promoting them to grand-sounding but empty offices. To find where power lies, look for the Minister who has no need to shout. So it is with Select Committees: the Common Frameworks Scrutiny Committee does not sound exciting, but it does not need to, as our work takes us to the very heart of our constitution as a union of four nations under the Crown. The effect that the noble and learned Lord, Lord Hope, and others had on the internal market Act, and the dangers highlighted this afternoon behind the Government’s somewhat cavalier approach towards the retained EU law Bill, are just two examples of the oversight required to keep the Government from straying from the constitutional path or complying with the rule of law.

The Government, I regret, have not given common frameworks the political attention or leadership they and the United Kingdom deserve. There has been a lack of ministerial focus on this area of post-Brexit public policy, no doubt because it looks uninteresting. The Ministers whom we saw seem not to have been prepared to devote the time to it because it does not look like fertile ground for getting noticed. However, if the slogan that got you elected was “Get Brexit Done”, you are under an obligation to complete the task in an orderly manner and not to avoid what you think are the boring bits. I acquit my noble friend Lady Bloomfield, who is on the Front Bench, of this charge because she has, over the last several months, played a significant—if understated—part in ensuring that common frameworks were not cast aside as some unimportant or peripheral issue, but were given proper ministerial attention. However, even she can achieve only so much.

I appreciate that members of the Cabinet have a great deal to do, so I do not expect the Secretary of State for Levelling Up to spend all day dealing with the progress or otherwise of common frameworks. However, it is disheartening for the officials working on this policy in London, Edinburgh, Cardiff and Belfast if less than full-throttled attention is given by the lead Minister and if the Minister with the day-to-day task of overseeing the work—currently the Minister for Housing and Homelessness—is not in the Cabinet Office. The Cabinet Office should be the panopticon from which the Secretary of State can see what is going on, at what pace and how effectively, in other parts of government. When things stop, slow down or go in the wrong direction, the Minister, on behalf of the Secretary of State, should be taking immediate steps to correct the matter.

I know from my own time in government—admittedly now a decade ago—about developing and implementing policy sometimes in the face of other Ministers’ lack of interest in the subject and an unwillingness to engage by overworked and distracted Ministers. First, encouragement from a Secretary of State not only activates the more junior Minsters but motivates officials. Secondly, it requires a senior Minister to grasp ownership of a policy for it to have any chance of success. Common frameworks, throughout their so far short life, have been the ugly little orphan whom no one wants to care for.

Too often, sloth and inadequate progress in departments to produce the necessary documents on time and of a sufficient quality have been all too evident. Correspondence from Ministers to the committee has occasionally been bland and failed to answer perfectly proper questions asked by us and has meant that we have had to go back to them for clarification, adding to the delay. Even worse, no or not enough corrective action has been taken by the supervising Ministers. Too many deadlines have been missed. It is no wonder that our report is subtitled An Unfulfilled Opportunity? To my mind, that is a statement: it is the answer to the question, not the question itself. If this is a foretaste of what Parliament will see with the REUL Bill, no one can say that we did not warn them.