Devolved Administrations: Memorandum of Understanding

Lord Lexden Excerpts

Monday 20th November 2017 Lords Chamber

[Lord Lexden (Con)]

My Lords, my noble friend Lord Empey has done us a great service by bringing forward this Question for debate. He has spoken eloquently on many occasions, as he has again tonight, about the strains which devolution, applied in different ways in different places, has put on the unity of our country. The benefits of devolution have been frequently rehearsed; the loosening of the ties that bind the constituent parts have received markedly less attention. Those ties need urgent strengthening to secure the future of our union.

My noble friend, I know, welcomed the decision of your Lordships’ Constitution Committee to take up this important issue at the end of 2014, when I was a member of it. The committee published its recommendations in two substantial reports, Inter-governmental Relations in the United Kingdom and The Union and Devolution. The first, which appeared in March 2015, stressed the need to make the memorandum of understanding, which is the subject of this debate, an effective instrument of good government in our country. It is one of the principal means by which devolution can be successfully reconciled with a strong union.

The memorandum sets out the arrangements under which the Joint Ministerial Committee, bringing together members of all four UK Administrations, should fulfil the vital task of maintaining accord between the powers granted to the devolved bodies and the overall interests of the union.

The first of the two Constitution Committee reports which bear on this debate made it clear that a revision of the memorandum is essential to enable the Joint Ministerial Committee to become a truly effective guardian of the unity of our country, which at the moment it is not. The Constitution Committee’s report called for much greater transparency of the JMC’s meetings, agendas and minutes. It also called for more frequent meetings and—a crucial point—provision for the devolved Administrations to initiate policy proposals.

A stronger union requires a stronger voice for the devolved institutions within the JMC, which might usefully be renamed the UK intergovernmental council to make everyone clearly aware of its vital constitutional role. Most urgently of all, the JMC needs to ensure that Northern Ireland’s voice is always heard clearly, particularly in relation to Brexit, whether or not its devolved institutions are in active life.

The Government responded to the Constitution Committee’s report on intergovernmental relations after an interval of just under two years. This hardly suggests that the safeguarding of our union—that “precious union”, as Mrs May describes it—has aroused great interest yet among policymakers. The committee returned to the issue in its report The Union and Devolution, for which it had to wait a mere nine months for a government response. In that second report, it said that,

“a new mindset is required at all levels of government—one that recognises the devolved institutions as now being established components of the UK’s constitution”.

Has that new mindset now been created? The evidence is not yet compelling. The Government are disinclined to set out the framework of intergovernmental relations in statute as the committee suggested, but by such means the devolved Governments would have their place in the new constitutional order properly defined and firmly delineated.

There have been profuse promises of greater transparency, and of more information about the work of the JMC, but a series of Written Questions I put down last month yielded brief, not very enlightening replies. On 17 January, the Government referred to a commitment to a review of the workings of the JMC. When will it be completed and the results published? The Constitution Committee concluded:

“The stability of the Union requires careful management of the balance between unity and diversity”.


The existing balance needs reconsideration and change. Why should people in Northern Ireland alone be deprived of the right to a same-sex marriage? Why should Northern Ireland be deprived of the benefits of the new and greatly improved libel laws?

Speaking on 9 October, my noble friend Lord Lang of Monkton, who chaired the Constitution Committee with immense skill, told the House:

“I sense that the Government have not yet fully engaged with the need to devise and articulate a vision for the future of the state and its devolution settlements”.—[Official Report, 9/10/17; col. 28.]


We badly need that vision, to which a revised memorandum of understanding would help give practical expression.