Strathclyde Review

Lord McNally Excerpts

Thursday 17th November 2016 Lords Chamber

[Baroness Evans of Bowes Park]

I thank the noble Baroness for her comments. She is absolutely right: we will face significant challenges with the amount of legislation, both primary and secondary, that will come to this House, and I am looking forward to working with the leadership across this House to ensure that we do the most effective job in helping to produce the best deal we can for this country. I am happy to take away her thoughts about scrutinising secondary legislation, and I will talk to colleagues in government.

[Lord McNally (LD)]

My Lords, I am always most worried when the House is congratulating itself on how wise it has been. I was a member of the Cunningham committee, and if there is a paragraph in its report of which I claim authorship and in which I take pride, it is the one that repeats the assertion by Lord Simon that this House must retain the right to say no. What makes this House work, faced with the Government’s oft-repeated threats to clip its wings, is its grim determination to retain that right to say no. The warning, and the danger, is that if we ever gave away the right to say no—sparingly as it is used—the dynamics of this House would change. We would become a debating society, because Governments would know that whatever process they adopted—option 3 was just a single example—they could bypass this House. This House is here for a special reason, and it is the right to say no that protects its authority and makes Governments think twice.

[Baroness Evans of Bowes Park]

I entirely agree with the noble Lord that this House has a vital role to play, but we must remember that the elected House has the final say, because it is the elected House. What we can do is add our voice and our expertise to ensure that opinions are reflected, and that we can improve legislation—but we are reliant on the House’s self-regulation and discipline to achieve that. As I said, I believe that we are constructive and we work well together—but if that breaks down, we will have to reflect on what that means.

Strathclyde Review

Lord McNally Excerpts

Wednesday 13th January 2016 Lords Chamber

[Lord McNally (LD)]

My Lords, I was intrigued by the very first sentence of the executive summary in the paper of the noble Lord, Lord Strathclyde, which states:

“Since 1968, a convention has existed that the House of Lords should not reject statutory instruments (or should do so only rarely)”.

To my mind, that is exactly what has happened over the past 50 years. The Motions that caused the establishment of the Strathclyde report, and even the noble Lord, Lord Strathclyde, himself has accepted this, were not in any way breaches of the convention in terms of rejection.

I am taking part today because it is 20 years since I first took my seat in the House, and therefore I thought it would be useful to contribute to what the noble Lord, Lord Strathclyde, referred to as the collective memory. During that time, I have spent nine years as Leader of the Liberal Democrats, three very pleasant years as the Deputy Leader of the House under the noble Lord, Lord Strathclyde, and three and a half years as a Minister. I have never made any secret of my view that although this House has many admirable qualities and does some extremely useful work, in its present form it is an affront to democracy. I regret the opportunities missed more fully to reform the House in 1999 and, as the noble Lord, Lord Wakeham, knows, I regret the missed opportunity of the Wakeham commission in 2000. However, we must not be seduced today by the argument that because the recommendation of the noble Lord, Lord Strathclyde, is close to one of the proposals made by the noble Lord, Lord Wakeham, it has greater weight and authority. The Wakeham proposals were, as I am sure the noble Lord would agree, a carefully balanced package of powers and responsibilities, not a single measure designed to weaken and undermine the authority of this House. I may want to see this House reformed, but I have no wish to see it become Mr Cameron’s poodle, and a neutered poodle at that.

One of the most useful experiences I have had in the past 20 years was to serve on the Cunningham committee, and I am delighted to see that the noble Lord, Lord Cunningham, is here today. It is worth remembering that the impetus for the setting-up of the Cunningham committee was that the then Labour Government thought that the House of Lords was getting too big for its boots. This is not a new phenomenon. Every former Leader of the House will be able to show you the scars of being hauled over to No. 10 to explain some defeat or other in the Lords. I well remember having to prepare, as Leader of the Liberal Democrats, a tribute to the late Lord Belstead, who had been a Leader of the House under Mrs Thatcher. I thought I would find something nice to say about him by looking at the Thatcher memoirs. The only reference I could find was to a handbagging he had received from Mrs T following a defeat in the House of Lords. That is the nature of the relationship. I freely confess to my own impatience as a Minister when the House shredded some carefully constructed inter- departmental compromise or spotted a piece of legislative corner-cutting which had escaped the scrutiny, or lack of it, of the other place.

I do not believe that the Lords over-reached themselves in the matter before us, but the whole furore has exposed the need to look at the increasing use by the Government of skeleton Bills backed by secondary legislation, as well as the increasing tendency of the clerks in the other place to affix financial privilege to an amendment. I remember the surprise and relief in the Ministry of Justice when some mainly legal amendments to one of our Bills suddenly had financial privilege attached to them in the other place. We all breathed a sigh of relief that they did not come back to the Lords.

It is 40 years since the late Lord Hailsham warned against a Parliament without checks and balances becoming an elective dictatorship. That warning is even more pertinent today, when the flaws in the first past the post system provide us with a Government with 100% of the power and only 36% of the vote. We are now living with our past failures to reform both the House and the voting system. In those circumstances, it is essential that this House should retain the right to say no. It is the paragraph of the Cunningham committee report that I fought hardest to have included, and that report was endorsed by both Houses. Let us be clear: that Cunningham report is the baseline; it is not Salisbury/ Addison, which was never endorsed by other than the two political parties, and never by these Benches. I urge this House not to abandon its right to say no: use it prudently, yes; use it sparingly, yes; but retain it we must.

I can only say to the Conservative Benches, on which there are some very wise heads, that the best service they can provide is gently to tell the Chancellor and the Prime Minister that the best way to avoid the hubris which overtakes all long-serving Ministers is to retain the safety catch which accident rather than design has left here in the House of Lords to protect us from that elective dictatorship which Lord Hailsham so wisely warned us against.

House of Lords: Strathclyde Review

Lord McNally Excerpts

Thursday 17th December 2015 Lords Chamber

[Baroness Stowell of Beeston]

My Lords, I have huge respect for the noble Lord, Lord Grocott, and I listen carefully to what he says. The key thing that I am trying to identify in my remarks today is that we are in disagreement about what happened in October. That is what I find regrettable. It means that the important convention, which stood the test of time for so long, has been broken. He refers to the Joint Committee of 2006, which predates my time in the House but I understand from all my reading and research how important and respected it was. That committee reinforced the convention, but the convention that it reinforced has now broken. So what we have done is come forward with something which offers that clarity and simplicity. It draws heavily on previous work that has been done by other groups, such as my noble friend Lord Wakeham’s distinguished royal commission. The noble Lord, Lord Strathclyde, has come forward with a proposal and all I ask at the moment is that the House considers it—as indeed we in government are considering it.

[Lord McNally (LD)]

My Lords, I sat on the Cunningham committee and I remember the background to it being set up, which was the irritation of the then Labour Government at the behaviour of the House of Lords. The phrase then used was that part of the intention was to clip the wings of the House of Lords. The truth is that Governments do get irritated by this House. I think that I may have expressed the odd irritation myself occasionally from the Dispatch Box. But where the noble Baroness is misleading herself is that the convention laid down by the Cunningham committee has not broken down, because in that convention it very carefully and clearly states that the House of Lords must retain the right to say no. That was a red line for me. The reason for it was that put by my noble friend Lord Dholakia: that without retaining the right to say no, used sparingly, carefully and rarely, we become a debating society.

The noble Baroness has been a very good Leader of this House but I urge her to recognise that the Leader has those responsibilities, beyond government, to lead this House in a way that protects its powers. We must let go of that right to say no only with very strong arguments to do so. They have not been made today. Go back to a Joint Committee of both Houses, and perhaps even consider the fourth option: that statutory instruments could be amended by this House. That would be a way forward.

[Baroness Stowell of Beeston]

I have huge respect for the noble Lord, Lord McNally, and enjoyed working alongside him in government. I understand how seriously he takes these matters but I am afraid that I also disagree with his description of what happened back in October. In considering that piece of secondary legislation, we did two things: we overruled the House of Commons on a matter of taxation and finance, and we used a type of amendment to a Motion that has never been used before. That is referred to in my noble friend Lord Strathclyde’s report.

The point about the power of veto is that we should retain it if we retain our convention not to use it except in very exceptional circumstances. What I am arguing is that we are no longer clear what those circumstances are and by what kind of method we would use that veto. So I am afraid that I feel that we need to be able to reach some agreement and come up with a convention with which we all agree. We have to understand that conventions require all parties to agree. At the moment, I am afraid that we do not agree.