Scotland: Devolution

Lord Greaves Excerpts

Wednesday 29th October 2014 Lords Chamber

[Lord Greaves (LD)]

My Lords, I am sure the whole House regrets that the noble Lord, Lord Barnett, cannot be here today to reply to all the comments about his formula. We all hope he is keeping well. I remind the House of my current interests in English local government. I wish to associate myself fully with the remarks of my noble friend Lord Tyler. I found myself cheering on the noble Lord, Lord Prescott, for his advocacy for devolution in the north of England.

To the surprise of many, certainly in this part of the kingdom, the Scottish referendum showed the intense feelings that people had about the dominance—I will try to use not very emotional words—of London and south-east England in the economy of this country, in investment, the financial sector, political power, government, media and culture. Watching all this on television, it came across to me that the degree of dominance is even greater if you just take England, because Scotland already has a substantial amount of political and financial power based in Edinburgh. This dominance is clearly linked to the distribution of wealth, incomes and influence; it is what people used to call the class system. Nowadays we are supposed to talk about social inequalities and not use the word class. However, it is not just social inequalities; the linked and closely related geographical inequalities are part and parcel of it. People are beginning to understand this much better now.

In the later stages of the referendum, the Deputy Prime Minister led calls for devolution, decentralisation, even a degree of federalism, in England as well as in other parts of the kingdom. To our surprise and horror, at the same time, we suddenly had calls at 7 am. I agree entirely with my noble friend Lord Steel about the nonsense of making announcements at this time but it is all to do with 24-hour rolling news. Top politicians nowadays think they have to dominate the day’s news agenda and hope to get through to the next day when something else will have taken over as the latest media fad. However, we had the attempt to resolve the West Lothian question by the introduction of English votes for English laws or, to use its appropriate acronym, EVEL.

Therefore, we are presented with a choice: that is, devolution to England and EVEL, however it may be carried out, or devolution within England to the regions—the towns, cities and localities of England. To pick up a point made by my noble friend Lord Thomas of Gresford, when the Prime Minister and similar people talk about England, it is not entirely clear whether they are talking about England or England and Wales. In terms of legislation, it is nonsense just to talk about England. Perhaps, instead of EVEL, we should talk about “EWVEWL” or something like that.

You only have to look at a typical Bill, especially a longer one, that comes to your Lordships’ House to see that towards the end there is a clause entitled “Extent”. Most noble Lords probably do not notice it. It states which clauses will apply to the different areas when the Bill passes into legislation. It is always extraordinarily complicated. When we were in opposition and I was responsible for overseeing the Marine and Coastal Access Bill from the Liberal Democrat Benches, I had the help of my noble and learned friend Lord Wallace of Tankerness to deal with the Scottish clauses. That was all built into the Bill and extremely complex. A lot of a typical Bill applies to England and Wales. Sometimes it applies to the Welsh Office directly and sometimes it applies to permissive powers to the Welsh Assembly and Welsh Ministers. Some of it applies to England, Scotland and Wales; to England, Northern Ireland and Wales; or to the whole of the UK. It is always complicated. If there is a serious attempt to deal with English votes for English laws, the whole way in which legislation is dealt with will have to be reorganised substantially. I suspect that often we could end up with three or four Bills instead of one.

When we were writing the constitution for the new party on the merger of the Liberals and the Social Democrats, my noble friend Lord Steel once accused me of being a north of England nationalist. I am not a nationalist; I am a north of England home ruler. I want as much local decision-making in the north of England as we can get. The problem is that throughout England, including the north of England, there is absolutely no consensus about the direction in which we want to go. My noble friend Lord Steel reminded us that it took nearly 10 years for the Scottish convention to get to the point where the Scottish Parliament was set up. At the beginning, the parties taking part all had a general consensus of the general direction in which they wanted to go; namely, home rule of some sort for Scotland.

There is no consensus in the north of England. We talk about city regions, which are a blind alley in many places because huge areas of the north of England are not in city regions. Some people talk about local authorities having more powers, which is a good thing in the short term, and some talk about regional bodies for the north-west, the north-east or for Yorkshire. I would like to see one for the whole of the north of England. Bodies such as One North, which was set up by some of the big cities to look at the transport links, lead us in that direction. However, there is no consensus. Before we can start talking about what we want, we must have debate and discussion in the north of England and, I suspect, in other regions of England to get some consensus of where we are going and what we want before we can stand up and say, “Home rule for the north of England”, which is what I should like to campaign on.