Cabinet Office: Constitution Committee Report

Lord Maclennan of Rogart Excerpts

Tuesday 6th July 2010 Lords Chamber

[Lord Maclennan of Rogart]

My Lords, I hope that your Lordships will not regard me as unwelcome intruder on this debate, for I think that I am the only person to speak who neither is a member of the committee nor has given evidence to the committee. None the less, I believe that this is a most important report for all of us who are interested in the quality of government. I pay strong tribute to the chairman of the committee, which has produced the most fascinating insights and evidence on which we can formulate political responses. No time seems to me to be more appropriate than the present, with a new coalition Government, for seeking to build on the central message of the report, as I read it, which is that changing structures of decision-making should lead to changing structures of accountability.

I believe that this debate is timely in two senses. First, the report is up to the moment. It has a response, albeit not very eloquent, from the previous Administration. It is also timely in that the new Government can take account of some of the principles and suggestions that have been raised. I hope that they will come back to Parliament with their own statements about the new structures of decision-making in Cabinet government and, in particular, describe how the newly structured Cabinet Office, in which the Deputy Prime Minister sits with a lot of constitutional experts, is apparently considering further constitutional reform.

As a first step, we should hear from the Government. I cannot expect the noble Lord, Lord Taylor of Holbeach, to reply in full to all the questions that have arisen from this report tonight, although I am extremely grateful that he is here to give us his thoughts. When that process has settled down, we need to have another debate on broadly the same questions with particular answers on the responses that the Government will make.

In my short contribution, I should like to focus on issues that were well described prior to this committee’s report, although it more than alludes to them, by the executive committee of the Better Government Initiative. The third chapter of its report dealt with the issues of the centre of government. It drew particular attention to the growing complexity of decision-making and a number of issues which perhaps might have been more easily divided between departments in the past but which it described as “cross-cutting”. That raises an issue that needs to be addressed in considering the proper role of the Cabinet Office.

I have heard, and I broadly agree with, the suggestion of the noble Lord, Lord Bichard, that the Cabinet Office needs to be slimmed down as far as possible. Certainly, if it is going to be properly accountable, its heads of responsibility need to be fairly sharply defined. Then there are the balancing considerations of incubator activities. The Better Government Initiative pointed out that a number of matters are intractable and are regulated within government to some extent by public service agreements. They cover matters such as social inclusion, drug misuse, environmental policy and, it was suggested, foreign affairs, including Iraq and Afghanistan.

What is the role of the Cabinet Office in these areas? I ask the question because it seems that we cannot rest on the old assumption that it is a matter for individual departments to take up these issues and simply to resolve them by sitting around the table in Cabinet committee. A deeper ongoing discussion is required before positions are formalised so that all those who are to contribute to the ultimate debate are able to be properly informed and bring whatever particular departmental interest or knowledge they have to bear on the conclusions. That could well be a role for the Cabinet Office.

Again, on reading the evidence, I am struck by the growing tendency towards presidential government. The noble Baroness, Lady Quin, attempted to rebut that view, arguing that fears about presidential government were somewhat exaggerated. However, that is not the thrust of the evidence that has been reproduced in this valuable report. Within the space of four paragraphs, we have the noble Lord, Lord Burns, saying that the search for joined-up government had,

“tended to push power towards the centre”;

we have in paragraph 147 Professor Peter Hennessy saying that departments were “thinly used” in comparison with the past; and we have the former Cabinet Minister, David Blunkett, saying that he,

“saw the tendency of both the Prime Minister’s Office and the Treasury to interfere in and to want to own the major decisions of all departments”.

What is that if it is not a tendency towards presidentialism? This is a serious issue, although I believe that a beneficial side-effect of the coalition may be that it less likely that one power, that of the Prime Minister—described by Sir Gus O’Donnell as a “subset” of the Cabinet Office—will attempt to hijack not just the presentation of policy to the cameras but the decision-making itself. Some of us were shocked at what we had read in earlier reports about the decision-making process on the Iraq war, which seemed to exemplify this danger at its very worst. Again, the report is constructive in its approach to these things. Sir Michael Bichard is reported as saying that,

“one of the central roles of the Cabinet Office should be to ensure co-ordination between departments because ‘we still have a very silo-based governmental system’, although ‘in other areas it should not interfere; it should not intervene; it should stand back and have a light touch monitoring of what is going on in departments’”.

It would be helpful if the present Government, in addressing these problems, could take a long, hard look at the issue of co-ordination by the Cabinet Office and indicate how they are going to improve it.

In the past 48 hours, a respected broadsheet has reported that the Foreign Secretary intends to take under his wing all matters to do with the European Union within government. That is an interesting suggestion, but it has to be recognised that many other departments are involved in decisions on Europe. If we are going to make those decisions properly accountable, which again is the thrust of this report, we need to know exactly where and how they are being made. The Cabinet Office could play a great part in all this.

I ask the House to forgive me for these external thoughts on this valuable report. I am most grateful, as I am sure many others are, for the work that has been done and I hope that it will be followed up.