Recall of MPs Bill

Lord Tyler Excerpts

Wednesday 17th December 2014 Lords Chamber

[Lord Tyler (LD)]

My Lords, as the noble Baroness knows, I share a large number of her concerns, not least on some of the detail to which she has given attention. We will, of course, come back to that in Committee. However, I do not share her view in one respect: the fact that the Bill has been a long time a-coming is indicative of the considerable interest that there has been at the other end of the building—for obvious reasons. I note that I am the first of some 10 former Members of Parliament contributing to this debate, and I suspect that we will hear some interesting observations in that respect.

In this House, I first proposed a recall power for MPs back in June 2009, in the immediate aftermath of the expenses scandal, to enable constituents rather than party leaders to instigate an appropriate review of the behaviour of their representatives. The proposal was defeated then but by the general election, just a few months later, all three parties committed to a recall power of the kind that I had proposed—one that covers “misconduct” and “serious wrongdoing”. At the last general election, that was how the proposals were expressed in a number of manifestos and it was, as the noble Baroness said, repeated in the coalition agreement. Now the Bill gives us the opportunity to make good on those promises. However, as the noble Baroness said, in its present form it is by no means perfect, and that is acknowledged by the work that has been done in the other place and the reference to our work on it there. There is important job of work for us to do.

There are technical issues to address in respect of ensuring that donors to recall campaigns are permissible and eligible, and to ensure that campaigns for and against recall are placed on an equal footing. On these Benches, we also note the reports of the Constitution Committee and the Delegated Powers Committee in respect of the order-making powers of the Bill. It will be for the Minister to demonstrate why these are the right powers.

However, there is one big issue of principle at stake that we must all in this House address. When and in what circumstances recalls should occur is, I think, agreed between the parties—that is, in cases of serious misconduct or wrongdoing. But where the collective forces of the two government parties and the Opposition have not yet secured a good solution is the key question of who should be involved in that process of determining whether misconduct has indeed taken place.

The Bill sets out only two bodies that may decide. One is straightforward: if the courts sentence an MP to a prison sentence, that immediately triggers a recall petition. The second is less straightforward. If the Commons Standards Committee suspends a Member for 14 calendar days or 10 sitting days, a recall petition is automatically triggered. The problem is that the voting membership of the Standards Committee is composed entirely of MPs. Even taking into account the lay members, that is plainly an internal parliamentary body. To the public outside, this—quite reasonably—smacks of being a group of people who seek to retain what we might call “exclusive cognisance” over their own affairs. I am sure that noble Lords have already seen that the public have been responding to that problem as if it were equivalent to MPs marking their own homework. That is a fundamental problem.

[Lord Campbell-Savours]

Has the noble Lord asked some of his colleagues on that committee in the Commons what actually happens? The independents have never dissented from the position taken by the majority of electives.

[Lord Tyler]

I totally understand the point made by the noble Lord but that does not mean, of course, that there could not be circumstances when the non-voting, lay members of that committee—one suggestion is that their number should increase, but that is a matter for the other place—should be the ones who take the decision and recommend it to the voting members. That is complicated and still raises important questions, to which I will return.

The Bill is intended to increase the public’s confidence in their ability to hold parliamentarians to account when they fall below the standard expected of us. Without some means being built in for some independent adjudication on those standards completely outside Parliament, the Bill will fail in that objective and will be criticised as such. My colleagues in the Commons, Julian Huppert and David Heath, attempted to deal with this problem during the Commons stages. It was acknowledged that their proposals were not technically perfect—what early attempt at amendment ever is, in either House?—but that the principle behind their ideas had considerable merit, namely, that an election court with appropriate safeguards, or something like it, ought to be able to consider petitions directly from the public alleging misconduct or wrongdoing, and to hear evidence to the contrary from the MP concerned. Where real misconduct had taken place, the process would trigger a full recall petition. A by-election would follow if 10% of the MPs’ constituents signed up within the eight weeks, under the terms elsewhere of the Bill.

The principle behind this process will ensure both that no MP could be ejected simply for doing his or her job, or for exercising his or her judgment in the terms that the noble Baroness just said, but also that the Commons, through its internal committees, cannot be thought to be closing ranks to protect one of its own where serious wrongdoing really has taken place. I believe that there will be a serious case for carefully phrased amendments in that vein in Committee. We will seek support from all sides of the House in improving drafting to present a workable proposal to this House.

If anyone is in any doubt that we have a duty in your Lordships’ House to attempt this, they need only consider the words of those who took leading parts in the debates on the Bill in the other place. On the day of the Commons Report and Third Reading, the Minister in charge of the Bill, Greg Clark, said that,

“the Government were clear on Second Reading that we are open to ways to improve the Bill and we stand by that commitment”.—[Official Report, Commons, 24/11/14; col. 681.]

That was on Report. Similarly, Stephen Twigg, Labour’s senior spokesman on these issues, said in Committee in the Commons:

“In principle, giving the power to the people to bring a case against their MP before the election court is a good idea. It treads the fine line between undermining an MP’s constitutional role and giving power to the people to hold their Member of Parliament to account for his or her conduct”.—[Official Report, Commons, 27/10/14; col. 134.]

On Report, his colleague Thomas Docherty, from the Labour Front Bench, reaffirmed that the Opposition,

“support the principles behind the idea. We agree … on the idea of an independent mechanism when it can be demonstrated that wrongdoing has occurred”.—[Official Report, Commons, 24/11/14; col. 672.]

I know that Mr Docherty would have preferred MPs not to vote on the proposals, leaving it entirely to your Lordships’ House. Nevertheless, he did presage the possibility that Labour Peers could,

“work with … Lib Dem colleagues to draft workable, robust and watertight proposals. We are clear that we are not giving up on the principle behind the new clause and amendment”—

on the third trigger—

“and we urge him to take the same approach”.—[Official Report, Commons, 24/11/14; col. 675.]

We are very open to that offer. We have all been asked in this House to do this work. We should therefore, at the very least, give it our very best efforts. If we can secure good, robust amendments in this place, it will then be for the Commons to take them or leave them. As the Minister put it at the end, the more fundamental point,

“is a matter for this House”—

that is, the Commons—

“and the other place, and any amendments”,

from us,

“would return to this House to be determined”.—[Official Report, Commons, 24/11/14; col. 680.]

This is, of course, the Second Reading debate, so I do not intend to expand further on the details of the amendments that we will bring forward. The principle behind recall in the case of serious wrongdoing is relatively simple and clear, yet the practice of implementing that principle is neither simple nor clear. As ever in your Lordships’ House, we have work to do to bring the two together. I look forward to working with colleagues on all sides of the House to do just that.

--- Later in debate ---

[Lord Tyler]

I am grateful to the noble Lord. I am sure that he would not wish to mislead the House. The Second Reading of the Bill brought forward by the coalition was passed by 338 votes at Second Reading in the House of Commons, with large majorities particularly in his own party as well as in the Conservative and Liberal Democrat parties.

[Lord Grocott]

I think that, not for the first time, the noble Lord, Lord Tyler, is rewriting the procedures of the House of Commons. He knows perfectly well that that Bill would not have got through the House of Commons without a timetable Motion—a kind of Motion that his party vehemently opposed when in opposition. I am happy to go through the history lesson of Liberal Democrat policies but, entertaining though that would be, I shall resist the temptation.

Briefly, we also had debates about the great constitutional merits of having directly elected police and crime commissioners. Again, I think that they were supported by pretty much everyone at one stage, but again it cost £75 million to hold the elections. Not so many people now think that it was a great idea because the turnout at the vote was 15%. Then, of course, we had the constitutional innovation supported by all three parties of referenda for directly elected mayors in 10 cities where the good citizens of nine of them said what some of us hoped they would say, which was, “No, thank you very much. We don’t want this at all”. I should say that were I ever to write a book—the House will be relieved to know that I will not—on this Government’s record on constitutional reform, the title I would give it would be I Told You So.

We now come to the Recall of MPs Bill. It is a measure of constitutional significance that will, as the Constitution Committee has said, affect the United Kingdom’s representative democracy. If you are doing that, the very least you would expect from the Government is a clear case for why this important constitutional change is required and what its effects would be. It seems to me that the case simply has not been made. We all know that, in practice, if Members of Parliament have been the subject of severely inappropriate behaviour, the mechanisms of the parties come into operation. Very often, such MPs resign and by-elections follow in any case. The House of Commons research paper on the Bill asks: how many people would have been caught by this Bill had it been an Act of Parliament 25 years ago? The answer is two. It is a Bill of 60 pages with numerous clauses and addendums. Do we really need a Bill of this length and complexity to deal with just two cases? Admittedly, the numbers of who would be affected might go up because of the amendment referred to by my noble friend Lord Campbell-Savours. He demolished the Bill quite eloquently, so there is certainly no need for me to add anything to that.

Let us be under no illusions. The Bill would inevitably affect the behaviour of the Commons, knowing the difference between a nine-day suspension and a 10-day suspension. It is not the difference between a yellow card and a red card; it is the difference between a yellow card and a ban for life. I do not believe that anyone seriously thinks that if the Commons effectively said that there should be a recall, or a recall petition, and if having a recall was advertised all around the constituency, it is pretty much inconceivable that the MP concerned would be re-elected at that or any subsequent election. That may be a good thing, but do we really need this whole recall mechanism and this Bill to deliver that objective?

We all agree that certain behaviour is unacceptable, so let us have no bricks thrown around the debate on that. The House can expel people if it wants to, it can suspend them for as long as it likes, and in practice the parties exercise their own discipline. However, as my noble friend Lord Hughes has just said, it is a short step from unacceptable behaviour to unacceptable policies. My noble friend made that case very strongly indeed. Perhaps I may add a personal additional point. Representing, as I did the first time I came here, a constituency with an electorate of 90,000, in which I had a majority of around 360, and in which the opponent I defeated polled 32,000 votes, I think it would have taken him and his supporters about 10 minutes to get a petition together to chuck me out, had he wanted to do so and had the mechanism been in place. That is particularly the case today with electronic petitions. We simply do not need this Bill and there is a real danger of mission creep.

I have to say that the Bill has a lot of the characteristics of a fag-end Bill of a fag-end Parliament. We all know that the reason for the delay is that when the Commons Political and Constitutional Reform Committee considered the Bill in draft, it said:

“We recommend that the Government abandon its plans to introduce a power of recall and use the Parliamentary time this would free up to better effect”.

That is terrific advice and is well worth considering now.

I would like to suggest a way of doing this, because of course we do have a system for recalling MPs—it is called a general election. I am something of an expert on the recall of MPs, having lost an awful lot of general elections. That is something which concentrates the mind. Oddly enough, this coalition Government, which want to introduce recall, have legislated to ensure that we have fewer general elections. It was an astonishing thing to do and it went through on the nod. Five-year fixed terms mean that, whereas since the war elections have taken place on average every three years and 10 months, they will now take place by law every five years. That inevitably raises the need for recall. If that pernicious Fixed-term Parliaments Act 2011 had been in operation since the war, there would have been 13 general elections instead of 18. This coalition Government therefore think that we have had too many general elections since the war, so no wonder they think we need recall. Why not extend the period between elections so that it is even longer?

I have a simple suggestion to make in line with the recommendations made in the report of the Political and Constitutional Reform Committee, which basically says: drop this Bill and bring forward another one. Why do the House and the party leaders not get together and support a Bill to repeal the Fixed-term Parliaments Act 2011? Modesty prevents me mentioning the Bill’s sponsor, but at a stroke it would move us substantially towards more accountability for MPs and would be far better than this Recall of MPs Bill.

Electoral Registration

Lord Tyler Excerpts

Wednesday 26th November 2014 Grand Committee

[Lord Tyler (LD)]

My Lords, I am delighted to support my noble friend Lord Norton of Louth, not just on this occasion but also in recognition of his very successful chairmanship in bringing all of us in his informal group to a successful decision. As a regular adviser of the Electoral Commission on the cross-party informal group, I obviously cannot speak on behalf of the Electoral Commission, but I think that my noble friend will agree that the commission is beginning to address some of the issues, not least because of the very effective pressure made possible by my noble friend. In particular, I think that the commission now recognises that with online registration and the extension of the electoral timetable, some of the problems that we identified in our group are being addressed.

To supplement my noble friend’s masterly summary of our group’s recommendations, I will make a short contribution on the basis of my 14 years’ service as a constituency MP. I had 87,000 constituents in North Cornwall. They deserved, and I hope that they largely received, the best individual and collective representation that I could realistically provide. I hope that was demonstrated by the fact that my small majority did get bigger.

In those circumstances it is important to put on record that the average constituency Member of Parliament, even if they have a substantial number of overseas residents, will never see them as a high priority in terms of representation. If at any point during those 14 years I had had regular communication with overseas residents who had previously lived in the constituency, I think that I would have remembered them, but it did not happen. I am afraid that it was very often a case of out of sight, out of mind. Even if the current level of registration of such potential electors was increased dramatically—I think that it is less than 20,000 at present—I fear that their special interests would not receive the attention they deserved and simply extending the opportunity to vote in a specific constituency beyond the current 15 years would, I suggest, not improve their chances of being heard.

In a previous debate I suggested that, as soon as registration levels justified it, we should look very carefully at the suggestion that there should be a specific constituency for overseas electors. The clinching argument for me is the fact that we pride ourselves in this country on the strong connection between a Member of Parliament and the residents of the geographical area that he or she seeks to represent. As a Cornish MP with a long Cornish ancestry and a mother who claimed ancestry going back to 1066—although the ancestors were probably immigrants at that stage—I had a personal commitment to that area. While we have the first past the post electoral system, which continues this close one-to-one relationship, which is always claimed to be such a strong advantage that it outweighs its disadvantages, that is all the more the case. Indeed, members of all parties have claimed it to be a reason to prefer the alternative vote to other preferential systems. So in those circumstances it would be illogical to boast of this crucial connection and then advance the case for unlimited electoral connection for those who have long since left the area. For those reasons, I think that the 15-year limit is not the crucial limit. Hence, when we in the group examined the options, I argued that we should examine the case for a specific constituency or constituencies for overseas voters, as mentioned in our report, as happens in France, Italy, Portugal, Croatia and, indeed, one or two other democracies in the wider world. As soon as the registration levels justify this, which I think would be something in the region of 75,000 under the current arrangements, I believe that we should review those arguments.

That brings us back to the report of the Cross-Party Group on Overseas Voters. The recommendations of the group bear repetition. I wish to put them on record as I think they are extremely important. We said that,

“we do not address the existing 15-year rule, but rather work within it. For those who wish to get rid of the limit, what we recommend will be necessary but not sufficient. For those who are opposed to, or see little point in, extending the limit, what we recommend will be necessary and sufficient. The unifying feature is that there is agreement on the existence of a principled case for encouraging all those who under our current law are entitled to register to exercise that right”.

I wholeheartedly endorse what my noble friend has just said on that point. The report went on to say that,

“contemplating having an MP for overseas UK nationals is not presently feasible given the small number of overseas voters who are registered to vote. They constitute the equivalent of about one-third of a constituency electorate. Were the number of voters registered to reach a six-figure number then there would be a case for reviewing the proposal. We recognise that there is a chicken and egg element to this debate. UK nationals may not register to vote because they lack any clear connection to those who they are entitled to vote for. Were they accorded a dedicated MP then they might be more inclined to register and vote. However, as there is no evidence to demonstrate that registration rates would shoot up sufficiently were a dedicated seat to be allocated, the case for introducing such a seat at this stage is not compelling”.

It is a case of registration, registration, registration.

I welcome the moves that the Government and the Electoral Commission have taken, partly as a result of my noble friend’s group and the occasions on which he, and others, have raised the issue in your Lordships’ House. However, there are a huge number of opportunities to improve on that and I hope we will hear of a few more this afternoon.

Representation of the People (Scotland) (Amendment No. 2) Regulations 2014

Lord Tyler Excerpts

Wednesday 19th November 2014 Grand Committee

[Lord Wallace of Saltaire (LD)]

My Lords, I will speak also to the Electoral Registration Pilot Scheme Order 2014 and the Representation of the People (England and Wales) (Amendment No. 2) Regulations 2014.

The Committee will be aware that individual electoral registration was successfully introduced on 10 June in England and Wales and on 19 September in Scotland. For the first time ever, people in Great Britain can apply online to register to vote. To date, some 67% of the 3 million people who have applied under IER have done so online. The draft instruments before the Committee today will make some further refinements designed to improve the operation of IER.

As noble Lords will remember, this is one of a long series of statutory instruments in this process. The process is being taken through with considerable care. Our aim is to ensure that the largest possible number are registered as we make the transition and that the integrity of the register is maintained as we do so. So far, the process has gone well. The matching process has been more successful than we expected, but we are concerned to maximise the number all the way through and we will be maintaining our efforts until the next election and beyond.

The Electoral Registration Pilot Scheme Order 2014 will establish a pilot scheme, enabling information about entries in electoral registers in 24 areas in England, Wales and Scotland to be compared with information held by the Secretary of State for Transport about individuals’ driving records and vehicle registration documents. The current IER system involves matching data against DWP records, and we are keen to see if there are other public data sets that could be used as well to increase the completeness of the electoral register. The order will require participating EROs to disclose their registers to be matched, including the use of the IER digital service, against name, address and, where held, date of birth information to be provided by the Department for Transport and the Department for Work and Pensions.

The Committee may recall noble Lords’ support for using DVLA data during the passage of the Electoral Registration and Administration Act, and will be pleased to see this practical scheme to pilot the use of this data. In 2011 a small-scale pilot indicated that using DVLA data, in addition to the match with DWP data, might increase the confirmation rate by a further 10%. The pilot scheme established by this order will test whether DVLA data will indeed add significantly to the confirmation match rate. The scheme will also allow for the piloting of data matching using DVLA data to identify potentially eligible individuals who are not currently registered. The pilot scheme will end on 30 June 2015.

I have heard, anecdotally, that people—particularly young men—who move very frequently do not on the whole bother to inform the state agencies with which they interact of their new address, including not reregistering with doctors. However, we are told that they do ensure that their driving licence is up to date and the right address is on it, so the DVLA data may help us in teasing out one of the under-registered groups in the population: young, unmarried men living in rented accommodation.

The Representation of the People (Scotland) (Amendment No. 2) Regulations 2014 and the Representation of the People (England and Wales) (Amendment No.2) Regulations 2014 will enable Crown servants and British Council employees living abroad to register online. The current electoral registration process for Crown servants and British Council employees relies on a paper-based declaration sent via the individual’s organisation, as well as an application to register. This means that these individuals cannot currently apply wholly online. The changes set out in the draft regulations enable them to do so. The figures that I have already given showing the high percentage of people who have registered online in recent months suggest that it would be very advantageous to enable them to do so. The regulations also replace the requirement to send the declaration via the employer, with a requirement for people, as part of their declaration, to supply their staff number or payroll number. The electoral registration officer will then be able to check with the employer that the applicant is entitled to register by virtue of a declaration.

In addition, EROs will be required where necessary to send a second reminder to people, such as overseas electors or service voters who are registered by virtue of a declaration, that their declaration is about to expire. Noble Lords may recall that in May the House approved regulations that disapplied the follow-up process for overseas and service voters, and may wonder why we are now being asked to apply it again. The answer is that we are not proposing to reinstate the previous process that would have required EROs, after the expiry of the declaration, to send an invitation to register to special category electors, followed up by two reminder letters and, theoretically, a visit by a canvasser. That process would have been expensive and impractical in the case of many special category electors, and it is right that it is no longer a mandatory requirement. Instead we are introducing a requirement for EROs to send just one further reminder to those special category electors whose declaration has not yet expired but which is about to do so. I am told that in a large number of cases, online addresses are available and it will be possible to do this online. This is a relatively simple step to take, without the need for the more protracted subsequent process that we rightly removed earlier in the year. The regulations also make minor updates to statutory references to registration appeals.

The Scottish regulations will also extend to Scotland one of the provisions on data sharing by local authorities for electoral registration purposes that were introduced for England and Wales in May. These allowed for the disclosure to an ERO of information contained in records held by the authority by which he or she was appointed, provided that a written agreement was in place between the authority and the ERO as to the processing of the information.

The different local government structure in Scotland rendered a provision for two-tier area data sharing, as set out in the legislation introduced for England and Wales, unnecessary. At quite a late stage in the drafting of the England and Wales legislation it was decided to provide additionally that the ERO’s own local authority may disclose its data to the ERO, provided that a written agreement was in place covering the use of the data. It appeared that such a change might also be relevant to Scotland but we undertook to consult EROs and local government organisations in Scotland about that before we sought to legislate. That has now been done. Here, therefore, is the regulation.

The Electoral Commission is content with the provisions of these instruments and the Information Commissioner did not consider that they raised any new or significant data protection or privacy issues. The three statutory instruments before the Committee will each play a part in the continued successful implementation of individual electoral registration in Great Britain, and I commend them to the Committee.

[Lord Tyler (LD)]

My Lords, I want to speak particularly to the second statutory instrument in the group, which relates to the pilot scheme to which my noble friend referred in the early part of his remarks. He quite rightly—and I welcome this—spoke of the whole context of this transition to IER. Those of us with the battle scars of a number of debates in Grand Committee over many years, going back to the previous Government—IER was a previous Administration’s initiative—will recall that this context has caused quite a bit of controversy, and rightly so because, as he emphasised, the register is a critical foundation stone of our whole representative democracy. The present Government, the coalition Government, have not changed the transition in any substantial way but accelerated the process. So my noble friend has rightly referred to the extent to which the Government are determined—I think the phrase he used was that they intend to take “considerable care” in how this transition proceeds. It is in that context that these orders are so important.

--- Later in debate ---

[Lord Wallace of Saltaire]

My Lords, I thank both noble Lords for their helpful and intelligent comments. I start by reminding them that in another area of the Cabinet Office, we are much concerned with data sharing, digital privacy and the whole question of public and private data. Concerns about data privacy have been one of our inhibitions about moving in this area. Unfortunately we have not managed so far to bring forward a Bill to harmonise and update the laws which apply to different government departments on their collection and maintenance of data, many of which were put into effect long before cloud computing and two or three generations back in terms of the use of computers. The terms under which some government departments hold data are significantly different from those of other departments. I am sure I do not need to tell noble Lords that the sensitivities of the privacy organisations are such that we move with care in data matching, certainly in disclosure, both between different central government departments and between local authorities and central government departments. This is one reason why we have moved with all deliberate speed on this, using, first of all, the DWP database and moving on from there to the DVLA database. When we started out on this process there was some hesitation within the Department for Transport as to the terms under which the DVLA database ought to be made available for these purposes. We are in a very sensitive area in terms of data privacy and data sharing.

[Lord Tyler]

Before my noble friend leaves that point, is he saying that there was actually some legislative, statutory problem with the DVLA which did not apply to the DWP? If so, I totally understand the delay, but three years of delay because of some administrative, bureaucratic decision making within the Department for Transport is more depressing. I accept that good progress has been made and I hope my noble friend has not taken my contribution as being in any way negative about the overall process. However, this particular episode is not a very happy one since we were raising these issues more than three years ago.

[Lord Kennedy of Southwark]

The noble Lord, Lord Tyler, makes a very fair point. We are all looking back with care: we understand that we have to be right and proper, but it comes with a bit of a spring in your step at the same time. There is a question of care and there is also just not moving very quickly. I think we need to get on with it.

--- Later in debate ---

[Lord Wallace of Saltaire]

I would mark that after the next election, we will have a major debate and a draft Bill on the question of data sharing. If we were to access the Google and Amazon databases, I am sure that that would go a good deal further to identifying those who are not on the register, but the Government do not have the legal right to do so, and again, it raises huge questions of privacy.

I think it was the noble Lord, Lord Tyler, who raised the question of an additional door-to-door canvass in the spring of 2015. When I visited the ERO for Wandsworth a couple of years ago—I should mention that the Wandsworth ERO is a member of the Government’s consultative panel—he told me that given the mix of sheltered social housing and new apartment blocks at the top end of the market, the borough of Wandsworth now has some 25,000 homes that are behind locked doors. The problem of gated accommodation, which all of us who deliver leaflets are painfully aware of, is making it more and more difficult to conduct the door-to-door canvass that we used to think was such an important part of the exercise. That is why we have to do all these supplementary things as far as we can. We intend to complete a door-to-door canvass as far as possible, but that is becoming much more difficult as we go on.

I will have to write to the noble Lord about precisely who was on the advisory panel of EROs. I have met a number of EROs during the last three years of the process, and have much enjoyed talking to them about the particular issues with which they are concerned. I will happily write on that.

There were a number of other questions. Why has it taken us so long to get round to data matching? I have explained that DWP records actually took us a very long way, and we are now seeing what we can do to gain further completeness. I was asked whether it was a cross-section of 24 areas—incidentally, it is 24 areas but 21 electoral registration officers, because in Scotland the electoral registration system covers several local authority areas. The areas range from Harrow, Southwark and Trafford to the City of Edinburgh, Bournemouth, Coventry and Newport—a fairly good mixture. I have marked one or two areas which have a high concentration of students and several inner-city areas. It includes the City of Edinburgh, for example, as well as Stratford-on-Avon. It is a pretty good cross-section of the country.

The noble Lord, Lord Kennedy, rightly keeps pressing us—as I hope he will continue to—on how confident we are that we will come out with a higher rate of registration than before. I can say only that we are continuing to work towards that objective. We have made some extra funds available to local authorities for this and we are now considering whether further additional funds would be helpful. From what has happened in the last two or three elections, we all know that late registration produces a great boon. We will not know how successful we have been probably until the middle of April 2015, because a lot of the target groups will not have got round to filling in their online forms until the campaign is upon them.

The Government will continue to stress the importance of registering and of people being involved. We are working with a number of non-governmental organisations. I spoke at a Bite the Ballot conference a couple of months ago. Bite the Ballot is working very hard, as are a number of other organisations, with particular vulnerable groups—in its case, young people. However, it is a matter for all of us, in all political parties and beyond, to keep up the momentum as we approach the election of saying that it is very important that you register to vote and that you do vote. That is the final dimension of trying to capture the maximum number of people.

I have two other things to add about the overseas dimension.

[Lord Tyler]

I am sure, from the long experience that my noble friend will acknowledge, that the best possible way to get people to register and to vote is to have a very close election, as was demonstrated in Scotland, of course. When I got a majority of nine, I managed a turnout of 83% on a very wet and cold night in Cornwall. When my majority went up, the turnout went down. I do not know how he can achieve a close result in every constituency in the country, but that is the ideal way to get a good turnout next May.

[Lord Wallace of Saltaire]

I will not have to organise the next election. Many of us fear that it will be very disorganised in this respect and that the competition among four or five parties nationally, which will quite often be a competition between different pairs of parties in different constituencies, may make for an extremely confusing election campaign. I spoke at an annual general meeting in Yorkshire and said that I thought we were going to have what would feel much more like a series of by-elections across the entire country. It will be very different constituency by constituency when it comes to it, but let us hope that it does raise the interest.

On the question of overseas voters—

Hansard Society: Audit of Political Engagement

Lord Tyler Excerpts

Thursday 16th October 2014 Lords Chamber

[Lord Wallace of Saltaire]

My Lords, I entirely agree that this is an extremely valuable report and I hope that a large number of noble Lords have already read it. I particularly enjoyed reading the preface by the noble Lord, Lord Grocott, who I think is the president of the Hansard Society. It is not just a question of the low propensity to vote; it is the problem of very low perceptions of Parliament and the extent to which there is clear disillusionment with Westminster among the young, in the sense that they want to be engaged in political activity but not in party political activity, and not particularly in activities concerned with Westminster.

[Lord Tyler (LD)]

As a fellow officer of the Hansard Society, I, too, welcome this audit. Is it not clear from the record registration levels in the Scottish referendum, and indeed the turnout there, that when each vote is seen to be counted and has an impact on the result, there is much more engagement by the public, including young people? Does my noble friend recognise that many of our fellow citizens feel cheated by the first past the post system, which of course does not produce that result? Does he not recognise that until we address that issue, the likelihood is that there will be many more people voting in referendums than in elections?

[Lord Wallace of Saltaire]

My Lords, we all need to take account of the extent to which, in the course of the Scottish referendum campaign, people across Scotland, including young people, got re-engaged in politics in a way in which they are not engaged in politics in England. It is quite clear from the barracking that there was across the House just now that not everyone in this Chamber agrees with the wise words of my noble friend Lord Tyler on the voting system, but we need very much to focus on the problem of alienation. If we were to find ourselves on a less than 60% turnout in the next general election and the party that then took office got less than 35% of the vote, which is to say fewer than one-quarter of the total votes possible, there would be clear questions about the legitimacy of that Government. I saw in the Guardian, so it must be true, that Labour’s strategists had indeed been talking about the 35% point at which they might possibly have a majority Government on a less than 60% turnout. There are some real problems that we all have to face.

Scottish Referendum

Lord Tyler Excerpts

Monday 13th October 2014 Lords Chamber

[Lord Wallace of Saltaire]

My Lords, I have said that this is one of the items that is currently being considered. As the noble Lord well knows, I could agree with him that we have a constitutional convention, but that would leave a great deal to be discussed as to what sort of convention, how it should be constituted and so on, which are also issues that we need to consider.

[Lord Tyler (LD)]

My Lords, does my noble friend recognise that it is not just the people of Scotland, Wales and Northern Ireland who feel that this country is woefully overcentralised in Whitehall and Westminster, but also people in Yorkshire and in Cornwall? Are the Government prepared to consider the early introduction of a devolution enabling Act so that Parliament can at least discuss how these procedures can follow, rather than trying to have an all-purpose, all-singing, all-dancing convention that could go on for many years considering all the issues relating to the UK constitution?

[Lord Wallace of Saltaire]

My Lords, I am old enough to remember the Kilbrandon commission, which took minutes and years in its own time and achieved very little. Indeed, one will even find in the eighth volume a memorandum which I, as a young academic, wrote. I suspect that no one has read it for the last 35 years. We are clearly concerned to move as fast as we can. City deals within the United Kingdom have begun to decentralise economic power to some of the major cities throughout England and elsewhere. City deals are the beginning of what might become a major devolution of power from Whitehall to our regions.

Elections: Weekend Voting

Lord Tyler Excerpts

Tuesday 1st July 2014 Lords Chamber

[Lord Wallace of Saltaire]

My Lords, the table I have seen of the days on which other industrial democracies vote covers every day from Monday through to Sunday. The majority of Roman Catholic countries vote on a Sunday. Almost all Protestant countries vote on other days of the week.

[Lord Tyler (LD)]

My Lords, is my noble friend aware that one of the original objections to voting on a Sunday was that there might be rather too much advice or direction from the pulpit as to how people should vote? Does he recall that our party suggested that there should be two-day voting at weekends—Saturday and Sunday—but with reduced hours so that there would not be any conflict with religious observance? However, he has not answered the specific Question with which this discussion started: what is the actual impact on business, on the economy and on families from the disruption on Thursdays? We need to know and there seem to be no hard facts.

[Lord Wallace of Saltaire]

My Lords, elections cause a certain amount of disruption on whatever day of the week one holds them. That is unavoidable. The question of where the disruption falls depends on what day is chosen. On the question of the role of churches, I am reminded of the occasion when I took a young Liberal called Elizabeth Barker, now the noble Baroness, Lady Barker, whose father had been the Minister at Saltaire Methodist church, to Saltaire Methodist church one day when I was about to stand as parliamentary candidate in Shipley, and the sermon was wonderful. It did not quite go so far as to say that people should vote for the candidate who was there but it got very close. I would like to hope that the church will do things like that in the future.

Chilcot Inquiry

Lord Tyler Excerpts

Tuesday 1st July 2014 Lords Chamber

[Lord Wallace of Saltaire (LD)]

My Lords, I thank noble Lords for their various contributions to this debate. The Government are also disappointed and frustrated that it has taken a good deal longer than we—or the Labour Government, which set up the inquiry—had originally hoped to complete the exercise. However, let me stress the exceptional nature of this inquiry.

I entirely welcome and agree with the emphasis of the noble Baroness, Lady Morgan of Ely, on this not being a matter of partisan debate between the parties. We need to get at what went wrong and the constitutional implications of what happened. We therefore want to keep this out of the election campaign, so far as we can. The sort of timings which the noble Lord, Lord Owen, suggested are well understood in government, in terms of not getting too caught up in the pre-election atmosphere.

Let me remind all noble Lords of where we started. The Chilcot inquiry was announced in June 2009 to identify the lessons that can be learnt from the Iraq conflict and the occupation which followed. It has looked at the UK’s involvement in Iraq in the period from the summer of 2001—at the time that the Prime Minister, Gordon Brown, announced the inquiry, that was some eight years previously and it is still less than 13 years away—to the end of July 2009, which is now some five years past. The inquiry embraces the run-up to conflict, the military action and its aftermath and the way that decisions were taken and it aims to establish as accurately as possible what happened to identify lessons to be learnt.

We have not previously published documents less than 30 years ahead, except in the most exceptional circumstances. Part of the delay and part of what has been going on is the product of having agreed that we will publish documents relating to recent events and referring to people who are still in active political life. That is part of the exceptional circumstances in which we are working.

Since 2009, the inquiry has taken evidence from more than 150 witnesses; it has travelled to Baghdad and Arbil for discussions with Iraqi politicians; to Washington to meet officials from the United States Government; to France to talk to French officials; it has met the families of British personnel killed in Iraq; and has read more than 100,000 UK Government documents. When Gordon Brown announced the inquiry in the House of Commons, he said that the committee would have access to the fullest range of papers, including secret information, and, as the noble Baroness has quoted, that,

“No British document and no British witness will be beyond the scope of the inquiry”.—[Official Report, Commons, 15/6/09; col. 23.]

It takes a long time to work through 100,000 documents, to consider where there are sensitive issues remaining and, in the process, incidentally, to consider a number of other documents which had not been provided to the inquiry. These are the supplementary ones which were discovered and have been provided in recent months. The inquiry is examining difficult and complex issues. The inquiry has estimated, it has told us, that its final report will be more than 1 million words.

The Sunday Telegraph remarked that the rate of spending had increased over the past two to three months. That is partly because the website has been revamped and expanded in order to cope with the amount of information which will be downloaded on to the website as it is published. It is a part of the preparation for publication.

As part of the process of drafting the report, the inquiry has sought the declassification of material from many thousands of documents from the Government. It says in my brief that this is absolutely unprecedented. If there is any comparison it would be the Saville inquiry in Northern Ireland, which also took a great deal longer than had been hoped, partly because the complexities it raised were much more difficult than had been understood fully at the beginning. As Sir John Chilcot has acknowledged, the process is labour intensive for both the Government and the inquiry. He said in November last year that he was grateful for the work done by departmental teams to deal with the disclosure of documents.

I hope that noble Lords have seen the letter of 28 May from Sir John Chilcot to Sir Jeremy Heywood as Cabinet Secretary, published on the website the following day, that agreement had been reached on the principles underpinning disclosure of material from Cabinet level discussions and communications between the UK Prime Minister and the President of the United States which the inquiry has asked to use in its report. My understanding is that most of the work on the 200 UK Cabinet meetings from which extracts will be provided has now been completed and that the inquiry is now working on the UK-US documents.

Again I have to stress that we regret that it has taken so much time, but we also recognise the sheer complexity of what the inquiry is working on. I have talked to a number of the Cabinet Office people assisting the inquiry and I am impressed by the pace at which they are now working and the hopes that they have that we are now within sight of the end.

The answer on the Maxwellisation process, which comes next, is that the second letters have not yet gone out but we hope to send them out within the near future. The Maxwellisation process will then take, we hope, a matter of weeks rather than months. The Prime Minister has stated clearly that it is his hope that the inquiry will be able to provide a report before the end of the year.

[Lord Tyler (LD)]

Will my noble friend specifically address the important point made by the noble Lord, Lord Owen? I recall very well, as a Member of the other place during the time—I am not sure whether any of my colleagues are here—the very specific information given to the House of Commons in preparation for that vital debate and vote. Will my noble friend give the House an explicit assurance that there will be careful consideration by the Government of precisely how we as a Parliament are going to look at the parliamentary implications of the Chilcot report? In that connection, it would be intolerable for the end of this Parliament to come before we yet had sight of the Chilcot report and its recommendations.

[Lord Wallace of Saltaire]

I understand fully what the noble Lord says and indeed what the noble Lord, Lord Owen, has said. I stress that this is an independent inquiry that the Government have stood back from, so the Government do not control what is happening in it. However, I entirely understand that when it is published it will be for Parliament, and a number of parliamentary committees, to take on board how much information was given and what the implications are for further information from the agencies and other aspects of government. That will be part of the follow-on to publication.

Representation of the People (Supply of Information) Regulations 2014

Lord Tyler Excerpts

Monday 16th June 2014 Grand Committee

[Lord Maxton (Lab)]

My Lords, the Minister would be surprised if I did not make some comment, but I shall be very brief. All of this would be totally unnecessary if the Government had not got rid of identity cards—what would now be called smart cards—at the beginning of this Parliament. If they had not done that, none of this would be necessary. We would have moved to compulsory ID cards and compulsory registration. All registration would have been based on the ID cards and that would have solved an awful lot of problems.

[Lord Tyler (LD)]

My Lords, I apologise to my noble friend as I missed the first few sentences of his introduction. I am moved to make a contribution only by the remarks of the noble Lord opposite. I wish to congratulate the Government on what I think has been an extraordinarily successful exercise. They have made huge progress. Many of us who have attended debates in this very Room over the past seven or eight years on this issue have been filled with foreboding that such an important but nevertheless rather dramatic change to our electoral registration system might have some major problems. It would seem that, on the whole, those problems have been dealt with most effectively. I think that it is only right that your Lordships’ House should express its appreciation and congratulations to the team within the department, which has worked so hard to make this a success, together with those in other parts of the administrative system, notably the Electoral Commission.

I have just one question for my noble friend. He made brief reference to paragraph 8.10 of the draft Explanatory Memorandum, which includes the question of whether the transition period might be extended. I think that I understood him to say just now that that decision can be taken only after the general election by whatever new Administration come to power. I would be grateful if he could just clarify that because, if there is any change in the transition programme, it is important that we know in good time, well in advance, that any such change might take place. However, I think that I understood him to say just now that that could take place only after the general election in May 2015.

[Lord Kennedy of Southwark (Lab)]

My Lords, I have only a very few comments to make on these regulations. As they stand, we support them because they will allow political parties to assist in promoting IER. One general point that I make every time that I stand at the Dispatch Box in the main Chamber is my concern about the people who are not registered to vote—at least 6 million people. Nothing I see coming from the Government ever deals with that. The Minister gave a figure of 85%, up from 75%. Is that 85% of the people who are presently registered, so that even more than 6 million people will not be registered? I want to hear more from the Government about what they will do about those people, because I do not see much for them at all.

I do not share the optimism expressed by the noble Lord, Lord Tyler, about how it is all going so well. The situation has certainly improved but I am also very well aware that there were some serious problems at the start. I know that from my membership of the Electoral Commission and elsewhere, so things have improved. Whatever Government are in power after next year will have to think very carefully about how to introduce this. If it is not perfectly right, we will have to extend the period to allow people to come on to the register, because it is really important that we allow our citizens to get registered properly. If there is a risk of more people being left out, it is not good practice.

Could the Minister also tell us a little more about the thinking of the Electoral Commission on how we are getting on with this process? I am very pleased that the Government have involved political parties, as they are crucial to getting this right, but I would like to know a bit more about the attitude of the Electoral Commission to the role of political parties.

Scotland: Independence

Lord Tyler Excerpts

Monday 16th June 2014 Grand Committee

[Lord Tyler (LD)]

My Lords, we should all be grateful to my noble friend Lord Purvis for initiating this debate, and to him and the noble Lord, Lord Foulkes, for the work they are doing with the all-party group, which is very timely. I notice that all noble Lords speaking today either have strong connections with devolved areas of the country or cannot really speak for England—and, indeed, Cornwall—beyond London, expect of course the Minister himself.

I should put on the record that, as long ago as 1968, I was the co-author of a booklet entitled Power to the Provinces, in which we argued the case for subsidiarity before the term was invented: that decisions should be taken as close as possible to the people they are going to affect. We are getting there, but it has taken a long time, as other Members have already said. The forthcoming Scottish referendum clearly brings a new cross-party and UK-wide focus to the need for a review of the situation. Today’s joint statement from the three Scottish leaders is obviously in that spirit.

The word “devolution” is usually used in terms of Scotland, Wales and Northern Ireland, while “decentralisation” is what people talk about in terms of England. There is a rather false distinction between the two, and I would argue that we need to try to bring them together. This Government have made huge strides in decentralising power within England using the City Deals. There has been a real difference there, but there is a degree of democratic deficit. These agreements between central and local government only go so far: they are, to some extent, about decentralisation of delivery but they do not empower local government in the same way that we have with devolution elsewhere.

I very much agreed with the noble Lord, Lord Whitty, who I am sorry is not able to be here today, when he said in the debate on the gracious Speech last week:

“We clearly recognise in Scotland and Wales the distance and resentment towards Westminster-dominated decisions. We need to recognise that the same instincts apply in Newcastle, Norwich, Cumberland and Cornwall”.—[Official Report, 11/6/14; col. 460.]

Hear, hear to that. The Secretary of State for Scotland, my right honourable friend Alistair Carmichael, recognised this too in his radio interview yesterday.

We have proposed a Bill to enable English devolution to fill this huge gap in our devolution ambitions for the United Kingdom. Credit should be given to Peter Facey, formerly of Unlock Democracy, who wrote about such a model in 2011. The principle is simply that parts of England may well want to take up powers akin to those already devolved to the Welsh Assembly, and that they should be able to do so provided they meet certain criteria. This would be true devolution within the United Kingdom, but it need not all happen at once in every part of England.

Dr Andrew Blick, in a very useful publication last week, proposed some similar ideas. He envisages devolution, first, of administrative power, then later of some legislative power—as happened respectively in 1998 and 2006 for Wales—and, in due course, of financial power to local authorities or groups of them. That is already happening—the City Deals are bringing together groups of local authorities in England in a very positive way. The menu of powers that he sets out is much as in the Government of Wales Act: everything is available, from agriculture to education and health services.

However, like the Spanish autonomous communities, different places could take up more, or less, responsibility according to local demand and the strength of local political identity. Having just spent the weekend in my old North Cornwall constituency, I can assure friends across the House that the demand there would be for a full assembly, like that of Wales and with the same powers. In other places, there may be a different timetable and a different objective. Dr Blick said,

“an English Parliament would not address the issue of over-centralisation in a meaningful way”,

and that it would be “a destabilising force”. Finally, he said:

“The history of federal experiments in other parts of the world suggests that when one component of the federation is so much greater than any other, the arrangement is difficult to sustain”.

I suggest that there is a trap in creating an unbalancing, centralising English Parliament without addressing further devolution within England.

For these reasons, I really think that the English question does not have an all-English answer. It is really not good enough. Real devolution within England through an enabling Act of the kind I have been able to only briefly describe—first to those areas which demand it and later to those areas that envy it—could advance the cause of really radical decentralisation in the whole of the United Kingdom, including its largest constituent part. This is a very timely debate and I am sure it will not be the last time that we will address this issue, as many noble Lords have already indicated, over the coming months. I welcome that.

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.