The Union (Constitution Committee Report)

Lord Howarth of Newport Excerpts

Friday 20th January 2023 Lords Chamber

[Lord Howarth of Newport (Lab) [V]]

My Lords, it was a pleasure to listen to my noble friend Lady Taylor of Bolton introduce this debate, just as it was a pleasure as a member of the Constitution Committee to sit under her wise and effective chairmanship.

We know that the union is fragile and at risk. Institutional mechanisms will not successfully maintain the union unless proper care is taken by London. The demand for devolution has been a natural and proper expression of the wish by the peoples of Scotland and Wales to gain, in what should be the maturity of our democracy, a fuller measure of responsibility for their own government. Granted with good grace, as devolution was by the Labour Government in 1998, growing nationalism and separatism need not have followed. Respect and co-operation are not mechanisms but attitudes. For Boris Johnson as Prime Minister to describe devolution as a “disaster” was gratuitously offensive and foolish. For another Prime Minister, Liz Truss, to have publicly dismissed the First Minister of Scotland as an attention-seeker was inexcusably disrespectful to the holder of that office.

During our inquiry, we were struck by how little Whitehall departments were attuned to devolution and by how little officials in Whitehall knew or thought about it. The operation of the common frameworks was desultory. Legislation currently before your Lordships’ House, the Levelling-Up and Regeneration Bill, shows the Government of the UK as having acted less than diplomatically and courteously over issues of consultation, legislative consent and regulation-making powers. Mr Gove is always immaculately courteous and no doubt he will appreciate these considerations. His recent letter to the committee shows that he is taking steps to improve these matters. The Government have handled the intergovernmental aspects of the Trade (Australia and New Zealand) Bill entirely appropriately.

It is good to see that Mr Sunak has observed the proper courtesies towards Ms Sturgeon and Mr Drakeford and has visited Scotland at an early stage in his premiership. Inevitably, the confrontation between the Governments of the UK and of Scotland over gender recognition will impose strain on the relationship, as is no doubt intended by the SNP Government. However, the constitutional mechanisms to resolve the issue are there. It is regrettable that the First Minister spoke of UK Ministers having

“not one iota of good faith”,

but Ministers should refrain from responding in the same coin.

The committee’s report has an important section on devolution within England. I have long believed that the public’s growing disaffection with our institutions of parliamentary government has one of its principal sources in central government’s repeated assaults on local government. The establishment of mayoral combined authorities was certainly a big step in the right direction, but devolution within England has been grudging and incomplete, characterised by deal-making, inconsistency, laborious and invidious competitive bidding processes, niggardly grants, and a refusal to provide fiscal freedom—which my noble friend referred to and the Mayor of the West Midlands has characterised as Whitehall’s “begging bowl culture”. If we are to revitalise local democracy and thence our national democracy, radical decentralisation is necessary.