Devolution (Scotland Referendum)

Lord Lansley Excerpts

Tuesday 14th October 2014 Commons Chamber

[Sadiq Khan]

The way the question is premised demonstrates that the hon. Gentleman does not understand that he is part of the problem. It is not a Westminster elite solution. He fails to grasp the crisis that there is in this country.

England makes up over 80% of the UK. There is no easy federal answer to the problem, and it does a huge disservice to disillusioned voters to pretend that there is. The Leader of the House may be one of the finest historians in the Palace but he has learned the wrong lessons from history. We need to be clear about the stitch-up that is taking place.

The unhappiness with the way the country is run is an opportunity to make some truly radical changes. The British people want to reshape the country and the way it is run, but they will not put up with a top-down, imposed settlement because that would be a stitch-up and that is precisely the kind of response from Westminster that the anti-politics mood is railing against.

I give way to the former Leader of the House.

[Mr Andrew Lansley (South Cambridgeshire) (Con)]

If the shadow Secretary of State is talking about the detail, he must surely come to it first by enunciating what principle he is applying. My right hon. Friend the Leader of the House said what principle he applied to the question of English votes for English laws. The shadow Secretary of State has had plenty of time to look at the McKay commission report. It said:

“Decisions at the United Kingdom level having a separate and distinct effect for a component part of the United Kingdom should normally be taken only with the consent of a majority of the elected representatives for that part of the United Kingdom.”

Will he or will he not accept that principle? If he has another principle to apply, what is it?

[Sadiq Khan]

If this had been the position of Her Majesty’s Government before UKIP was a threat, one would have expected that response when the McKay report was published last year. That was not the Government’s response last year. Their response was, “Let’s properly consider this and assess the consequences.” The right hon. Gentleman is trying in a piecemeal manner to pick off the various challenges that we face as a country. That is one of the reasons we are so hated by the public.

--- Later in debate ---

[Mr Andrew Lansley (South Cambridgeshire) (Con)]

Thank you, Madam Deputy Speaker. I will try to be as brief as I can.

I am very pleased to follow the right hon. Member for Belfast North (Mr Dodds). I think many of us on both sides of the House can agree that it was very important to all of us that the people of Scotland voted as they did to support the Union. That did not mean that there should be symmetry across the country and it certainly did not mean that they were voting in any sense to undermine the Union by stages. On the contrary, we can strengthen the Union, be true to the positive vote secured in the Scottish referendum and, at the same time, give people what I know they are looking for in Scotland and elsewhere across the United Kingdom: a sense of greater control and accountability for the decisions made in their name and by their elected representatives.

I want to put on the record that it is absolutely vital that, recognising and welcoming the vote of the people of Scotland, we should deliver on the commitments that were made to them. We will deliver on those commitments, for example, those in the vow. That is not conditional and should be done within the agreed timetable. We should bring those measures forward and ensure that we live up to that.

Part of the vow was the commitment to the ability of the people of Scotland to make their own decisions on the resources and the organisation of the national health service in Scotland. During the course of the referendum debate, I was astonished to hear Nicola Sturgeon, who was my counterpart in Scotland as Scottish Health Minister, talking about how, in the future, there was a risk to the independence of the NHS in Scotland. There never was when she had any conversations with me. Whenever we worked together we did so voluntarily, for example on standardised packaging for tobacco products. I would never hear her countenance the thought that anything that I said should happen in the NHS in England should necessarily happen as a consequence in Scotland. She retreated to the issue of finance. Frankly, with what we are committed to and will bring forward in terms of further devolution of the power to raise and spend one’s own resources, Scotland will have the absolute right to determine the resources and the organisation of the NHS in Scotland.

As a consequence of all that, in this country we have to recognise—I will not go on about it; I do not have time—further fiscal devolution to the local authorities in this country. I do not think for a minute that we are interested, as the hon. Member for Halifax (Mrs Riordan) suggested, in regional government. I agree with her that we are not interested in an English Parliament. I think that the people of England look to the Westminster Parliament to make their laws, but I think they recognise that raising and spending money locally is a good thing. With accountable elected representatives, we can and should make that happen.

[Mr MacNeil]

Does the right hon. Gentleman support full fiscal autonomy for Scotland? That is the logical solution to his argument, not the partial devolution of taxation which, when we take into the account the Barnett formula arrangements, is merely rearranging the deckchairs.

[Mr Lansley]

We are committed to retaining the Barnett formula. There will be an extension of the ability to raise and spend one’s own resources, not full fiscal autonomy. That has to be an outcome determined by the Smith commission—to see to what extent this can happen—but it seems to me that it is right. As the right hon. Member for Belfast North made perfectly clear, the outcome in each of the countries of the UK will look different because our devolution settlement is asymmetrical.

If there is not an English Parliament or fiscal devolution, a further question arises. Can we have English votes for English taxes? I might not agree with all my colleagues on this point, but I thought that the right hon. Member for Kirkcaldy and Cowdenbeath (Mr Brown) raised an Aunt Sally and attacked it. There is not a Conservative proposal for English votes on income taxes. I do not think the analogy holds between devolution on income tax in the other countries of the UK and England. For example, Scotland has a Scottish Government with a Scottish Budget accountable to a Scottish Parliament, and it can determine Scottish income tax in that structure of decision making and accountability. We do not have an English Government, an English Parliament or an English Budget; we have a UK Budget, and to support a UK budget we must have UK taxation. We cannot contemplate the separation of English income tax, although we can devolve some taxes inside England, especially to local authorities and city regions.

[Mr Redwood]

Is my right hon. Friend seriously suggesting that Scotland could set its own income tax at a lower rate and that Scottish MPs could come to Westminster to make English people pay more?

[Mr Lansley]

Yes, I am, because it is untenable to have a separate vote by English MPs on English income tax, if the consequence, should the vote go a certain way, were to undermine the UK Budget.

English votes for English laws is, however, entirely tenable, and we now need to act. I agree fundamentally with the McKay commission where it states:

“Decisions at the United Kingdom level having a separate and distinct effect for a component part of the United Kingdom should normally be taken only with the consent of a majority of the elected representatives for that part of the United Kingdom.”

However, that ought not to exclude the views of other Members, whether they be my right hon. Friend the Member for North West Hampshire (Sir George Young), my hon. Friend the Member for Milton Keynes South (Iain Stewart) or anyone else. We can do it in Parliament by making provision, through a Grand Committee or a legislative consent motion, for English MPs, or English and Welsh MPs together, to give explicit consent to legislation that applies separately and distinctly to England, or England and Wales.

That should not exclude the central proposition, however, that all laws made by the UK Parliament should be made by all Members of the House of Commons. Anything else would undermine the character of the Union Parliament, which is the basis on which our Union is constructed—the Crown in the Union Parliament as a whole. We can make it happen. It would be a proportionate response to the undeniable demand of my constituents, and constituents across England, that their elected representatives determine what laws are made in England, without the perverse and unacceptable anomaly—as they see it—of Scottish MPs voting on laws in England that do not apply to their own country. We can make this happen, but we need to make it happen now.