Devolved Administrations: Memorandum of Understanding

Lord Hunt of Kings Heath Excerpts

Monday 20th November 2017 Lords Chamber

[Lord Hunt of Kings Heath (Lab)]

My Lords, I am most grateful to the noble Lord, Lord Empey, for initiating this debate. He speaks with wide experience of service to the devolved Government of Northern Ireland, and of course to the peace process. It has been an excellent and serious debate. We also welcome the noble Baroness, Lady Stedman-Scott, who will be winding up for the Government.

As we have heard, the memorandum of understanding underpins the relationship between the UK and the devolved countries. It includes an agreement to participate in the Joint Ministerial Committee and the concordat on co-ordination between the Administrations on EU policy issues. I agree with the noble Earl that much has happened since the MoU was brought to fruition.

I also have sympathy with the description used by the noble Lord, Lord Empey, of our haphazard approach to constitutional change. He is right; this is the way that we tend to do it. He is also right in that we sometimes a reach a point where it simply is not good enough. One area, which is rather separate from this debate, is Lords reform, which is a classic of its kind. Proposals are made simply to deal with the issue of the Lords, perhaps through an elected House, but they completely ignore the impact this would have on the rest of the constitution. I do not want to trade insults with noble Lords on the other Benches, but that essentially was the problem with the Clegg Bill. Mr Clegg seemed to have no interest in how it would interface with the Commons and the rest of the constitutional arrangements—and there are many other examples.

I do not think anyone can think, post Brexit, that we do not need to come back to look at our constitutional arrangements. My party believes that there needs to be a kind of constitutional convention to allow us to examine these matters in great detail, and I commend that to the House.

The noble Lord, Lord Empey, used the rather wonderful expression “devolve and forget”. I say, for local government in England: if only that were the case. I think he is seeking to place some kind of accountability framework into the relationship between Westminster and the devolved Governments. With respect to him, I am not sure that that is entirely consistent with the spirit of devolution, although I accept that what he described was a light-touch approach—and I certainly understand the benefit of shared knowledge and experience.

I shall give one example from the area I know best, the National Health Service. Essentially, within a common philosophy, we see four countries developing different ways of organising the National Health Service. I have no problem with that, but it is very important none the less that staff are able to move between those four countries easily and that there is shared knowledge and understanding. Certainly I very much support efforts to ensure that, where we see different developments in the four countries, there is a means of sharing understanding and learning from experience—but I am wary of a formalised accountability framework.

The noble Lord, Lord Bew, mentioned the renewable heat initiative. I think he was suggesting it as an example of where Northern Ireland, in particular, has areas where it does not have the expertise or capacity to discharge a particular responsibility. That is a heavy area to go into, and I think we should see the outcome of the independent inquiry before we draw any conclusions.

Much of this debate has understandably been about Brexit. As noble Lords have commented, we have debated a series of excellent reports by Select Committees on devolution and intergovernmental relations in the UK. Clearly, Brexit gives a new context and urgency to all these issues, but the Government’s stewardship of the JMC on the Brexit negotiations has left a lot to be desired. As the noble Lord, Lord Wigley, said, it did not meet between February and October—and when it does meet it does not currently have an elected voice attending on behalf of Northern Ireland, which is another problem. We would have built into the Act formal consultation with the devolved Administrations in the Brexit process, but we seem to have a rather haphazard and unwise approach to how the Westminster Government work with the devolved countries. The noble Lord, Lord Thomas of Gresford, pointed to the problem of the legislative consent Motions, which are apparently not coming from the devolved countries.

As part of Brexit, there will be a new landscape for devolution to navigate and more competencies overlapping between the UK Government and the devolved legislatures, and there are going to have to be new common frameworks on areas that at the moment are governed by EU agreements. So clearly the MoU has to be updated, and we need to see devolution strengthened and protected throughout the process.

Finally, the Bill currently going through the other place not only includes a sweeping power grab by Ministers at the expense of the sovereignty of Parliament but undermines the UK’s devolution settlement. The risk surely is that in devolving areas the Bill moves power directly from Brussels to London and the plans for common frameworks appear to be simply that they will be imposed from above. We have to avoid this. This has been a very short but excellent debate, which has raised some very profound issues that we need the Government to focus on.