Coalition Government: Constitution Committee Report

Lord Tyler Excerpts

Tuesday 13th May 2014 Lords Chamber

[Lord Tyler (LD)]

My Lords, I hope that the noble Baroness, Lady Jay, has taken pleasure not only from the credit that has been given to her for her stewardship of the committee and the very valuable report, but from how interesting this debate has been. That is also a considerable tribute to her and her committee. The temptation is, however, to pick up some of the interesting range of issues and stray a long way from one’s intended text—and, I fear, bore the House.

However, I want to take up just one point made by the noble Lord, Lord Butler, who knows I have great respect for his views. I do not take the view that the fifth year of this Parliament will be a complete waste of time just because we do not have a whole lot of new laws being put before us. Ministers too often think that it is of great importance and virility to have some great Bill put before Parliament and that otherwise they think that they will not really exist in the public mind or among their colleagues. If we spend some time in this next year on post-legislative scrutiny and look at how successful or not some of the previous laws have been, that would be a valuable lesson for us and, in that respect, the Fixed-term Parliaments Act could well prove to be a real success.

I am delighted that my noble friends Lady Falkner and Lady Grender, are contributing to this debate—my noble friend Lady Falkner because of her contribution to the committee, and my noble friend Lady Grender, as I am sure colleagues in your Lordships’ House will discover, because she will bring to the debate an interesting view about the way in which some of these matters have been happening in the recesses of a coalition Government.

I confess to the noble Baroness, Lady Jay, and the House that I approached the report with some trepidation, because I thought that it might be narrow and cautious, and even take a rather conservative view. I thought that we might be looking at just the way in which we somehow deviated over the past four years from the great conventions of the past. That has not been so. As someone who has always been keen on having a written constitution, there are moments when I have said over the past four years, “Thank God we haven’t got one” because we have been able to evolve to meet the requirements of the situation.

Here in the committee’s report is an interesting recognition of the political facts of life. As paragraph 2 of the report rightly points out:

“Trends in voting behaviour, with fewer votes for the two largest parties and an increasing number of MPs representing smaller parties, make it increasingly possible that hung parliaments will recur”.

Ironically, the other place, which ought to be much more responsive to changes in the views of our fellow citizens, seems to be still stubbornly bipolar by comparison. With that in mind, it seems right to consider the constitutional implications in light of the essential job that a balanced Parliament has to do on behalf of the nation—that is, to give life to what the electorate have instructed, albeit with what most people would regard as an inconclusive result. This is the first peacetime majority Government since 1931. That is to say it is a Government whose MP supporters were elected by more than 50% of those who voted. Those who are in favour of minority Governments should think carefully about the example of the summer of 1974, when a Government who had no majority did nothing useful whatever, ended up with an early general election and there was then an unstable Government thereafter.

Those who voted in 2010 for the governing parties would probably disagree on many issues were they were to meet around a focus group table or a table in a pub. After all, if they had all felt the same, they would have voted for just one party. They did not. We should therefore be relaxed about the fact that their representatives in Parliament and in government sometimes disagree, too, sometimes openly. That may be better than the sort of divisions that were clearly behind the scenes in the previous Administration, as we now know from so many autobiographies and diaries.

Collective responsibility in all Governments—particularly in this one—is like the security services: you only find out about their failures but never hear about their successes. Despite all the inevitable journalistic craving for “coalition splits”, this Government have succeeded in upholding collective responsibility much more often than they have failed, with agreements reached more often than differences have been aired. By far the majority of the coalition agreement has stood the test of tensions between the parties. Where collective responsibility has been absent is where collective agreement has been absent, too. One is necessarily dependent on the other, and where a party has not signed up to a particular policy in a coalition agreement, its leadership within the Government cannot always be bound to a position preferred by the other coalition partner.

A generally successful Government would surely aspire to the committee’s recommendation in paragraph 78 that setting aside collective responsibility should be rare. I agree very much with my noble friend Lady Falkner on the example picked out in paragraph 73—in contrast to my other noble friend Lord Strathclyde, who made a meal of the other example given in an earlier paragraph. How rare will always be determined in future balanced Parliaments both by Harold Macmillan’s famous phrase “Events, dear boy” and by the depth and breadth of the agreements reached between the parties to a future coalition.

For that reason, the committee’s recommendation at paragraph 26 that there should be a full 12-day interval between the general election and the meeting of a new Parliament is really important. The coalition worked with extraordinary speed in agreeing a programme and an Administration at a time of grave economic risk for the whole country. Future coalitions should not have to work in such circumstances. Five days to determine the programme for five years of government is not necessarily sufficient. Indeed, international experience suggests that even 12 days might be a push. However, the idea that our country would grind to a halt if a change of government took even 28 days seems excessive. The wheels of Whitehall would keep on turning. It would just be a little longer before big changes in policy could be effected and big announcements could be made.

Incidentally, I believe that the one really serious omission in the committee’s report is what seems to be a failure to take account of other mature democracies’ experience. It is surely excessively insular—perhaps even xenophobic—not to take some notice of the extensive coalition experience of our continental neighbours and partners. Some of them may, as we all know, take excessive time to knit together coalition agreements, but other aspects of their arrangements may well give us useful insights. As with collective responsibility, I do not believe that the British people would be that worried about delay in the same way as the British 24-hour news media seem to be. Any repeat of the ludicrously overblown warnings of imminent Armageddon from Conservative newspapers in May 2010, with dire foreboding of a hung Parliament and parliamentarians being hung from the lampposts, will hardly seem credible in the future.

I believe that the committee has put its finger on the right way for the House of Commons to endorse a Government, once in place. I do not agree with those who, even this evening, have suggested that an investiture vote for a Prime Minister would be to endorse the person. I do not believe that is appropriate, so I am glad to see that it is rejected by the committee. Why should a junior coalition partner endorse a person of another party to be Prime Minister per se before the negotiations on programme and team have taken place and been concluded?

To my mind, in any case, a really important constitutional principle is that the House of Commons, newly elected by the nation, should be investing its confidence in the new Government—both their programme and their personnel—at the end of the Queen’s Speech. The committee is absolutely right on that point. Otherwise, taking the Prime Minister out of that equation would imply a further and, I think, entirely improper drift towards presidential governance. What makes a coalition fit together is a programme on which the parties can agree, even if the people—the characters—involved later prove to be important glue sticking it together through the ups and downs of political fortune.

As has already been referred to, the Institute for Government has done excellent work in recent months in this Parliament, studying how the political structures in Whitehall have responded to the coalition. It has found that by and large our constitutional arrangements, following the political circumstances of the time, have proved up to the job. That is the essence of the system. I understand that this very day Peter Riddell has been giving evidence to the Public Administration Select Committee at the other end on behalf of the Institute for Government. I pay tribute to him and his team for the work they have done.

Even if we did benefit from a written constitution, as almost every other mature country does, the day-to-day decision-making of a Government comprising two or more parties could not be constrained to pretend that they are one party. It is wrong and it should not be so. The political fortunes of both partners depend on their distinction from each other, while the fortunes of the country depend on the partners working together. Two or more parties working together make for better government and for better politics too, but inevitably that is the politics of disagreeing where you have to— that is what it is all about—and seeking agreement as best you can. At least it is done transparently in contrast to many of the single-party Governments of the past.

This Government, and the past four years, have shown that it is possible to secure both that disagreement, which is inevitable in politics, and also that measure of agreement to produce good governance. Even the Westminster Parliament, with all its pomp and flummery, has responded because it has needed to. The committee of your Lordships’ House has performed an extremely valuable function in demonstrating how that has been undertaken. Its analysis and advice will guide us to good effect, whatever the parliamentary arithmetic in May 2015 and in future general elections. I suggest to your Lordships that many of the lessons will stand equally well for single-party government as for coalitions in the future. I particularly endorse the view of the noble Lord, Lord McConnell. I hope that the recommendations will be taken seriously not just by the present Government—and I hope that there will be collective responsibility in their response to this—but by the opposition party, because between now and May next year the lessons of this report will stand us in very good stead.