Government and Parliament

Lord Wakeham Excerpts

Thursday 9th June 2016 Lords Chamber

[Lord Wakeham (Con)]

My Lords, it is one of the great strengths of the House of Lords that a considerable amount of thinking seems to go on between one debate on a subject and the next time that it comes up. That is a credit to everyone, but today I think credit is due particularly to the Leader of the Opposition. A great deal of what she had to say was very sensible, and I am very glad that she said it. This goes back to what I said in the Queen’s Speech debate: I wanted a proper discussion on these matters and I wanted it to be led by the Opposition. Governments have the chance to bring in legislation if they want, but Oppositions are the people who have the power and the opportunity to persuade people that we are not doing things the right way and that we ought to change them. So I am full of praise for the start of the debate. I am hesitant to say a lot of the things that I might otherwise have said, because I do not want in any way to prejudice a proper discussion of all these matters, which I think is not best done in the atmosphere of the House.

However, we are not quite as bad as some people have made out. If we look back to the debate on 24 March, we see that a lot of concerns were expressed but there were quite a lot of things on which most of the people who spoke more or less agreed. First, for example, there was a degree of unanimity that things were not satisfactory at present. Secondly, there were those of us who argued that what we were concerned with were clashes between the Lords and the Commons, while others argued that they were clashes between the Executive and Parliament. It was the noble Lord, Lord Butler, who pointed out that they are both the same thing in practice, and that we ought not to get too uptight about that. There was also, as there has been in this debate, a general feeling that a Government with a majority are entitled to get their business through. Lastly, while no one actually ruled out legislation, at least on the government side, there was a general feeling that if we could find a way of dealing with these matters without legislation it would be a great advantage to everyone. Of course there were things on which we disagreed, and we have encountered them again today, such as statutory instruments, Henry VIII clauses and so on.

It is roughly 44 years since I came into Parliament, and I have to say that these debates have been going on for all that time and probably will for another 44 years after I have long since disappeared. The evidence is not overwhelmingly on one side, which is why the matter needs to be looked at. There are people who argue that that is not what has actually been happening. It is argued—my noble friend Lord Norton said something like this a minute ago—that the Executive are becoming more powerful than Parliament. However, quite a lot of academic research demonstrates that Parliament has much more power over the Executive than was ever the case in the past. There is a considerable amount of academic information about things that Parliament has done to Bills brought in by Governments. I would like there to be a cool discussion of these issues in finding a better way forward.

Every now and again we hear from the noble Lord, Lord Richard, on this subject. He is quite right to raise the question of financial privilege—we have not yet had an answer on that. We need to know what goes on and whether it is properly controlled. It is not that we are worried about the House of Lords having the right to vote down secondary legislation; it is the fact that under the present system there is a complete veto. That is the problem. We need to find a way of getting over it, so of course we need to have a proper discussion. An absolute veto is not acceptable in this day and age.

I very much welcome the tone of a lot of the contributions to this debate. There are ways forward that will not necessarily require legislation, but this issue will require a certain amount of good will and co-operation on all sides of the House.

[Lord Woolmer of Leeds]

The noble Lord mentioned an absolute veto. Is it not the case that a statutory instrument annulled by this House as a negative instrument can be brought back immediately with a change of title, and that an affirmative resolution instrument which is rejected can be brought back with minor amendments? So it is not an absolute veto. That is what happened in the case of the Rhodesian sanctions.

[Lord Wakeham]

Somebody who has spent as many years in business management as I have knows that there are ways around all sorts of things. However, the fact is that a statutory instrument which is rejected by this House is dead and another way has to be found of dealing with it. In my opinion, that is a nonsense. We have to find a way of giving this House more influence while recognising that, ultimately, the House of Commons has the final say.

Strathclyde Review

Lord Wakeham Excerpts

Wednesday 20th April 2016 Lords Chamber

[Baroness Stowell of Beeston]

My Lords, as I have already said, the Government are considering carefully all the options that are in my noble friend Lord Strathclyde’s review. We will take account of what has been included in the reports of the various Select Committees of this House. When we reach a decision, we will publish our response, but we have not yet reached our decision.

[Lord Wakeham (Con)]

My Lords, my noble friend is absolutely right to reflect on these reports, but I hope that she will bear in mind that the proposals of the noble Lord, Lord Strathclyde, were to make sure that secondary legislation was dealt with more democratically in Parliament as a whole. Will she therefore take very good note in her considerations of what the noble Lord said?

Strathclyde Review

Lord Wakeham Excerpts

Wednesday 13th January 2016 Lords Chamber

[Lord Wakeham (Con)]

My Lords, we have had three powerful speeches so far. A great deal of what the leaders of the two opposition parties said was about criticising what went on in the House of Commons. I have some considerable sympathy with that but want to restrict my remarks to what I consider to be the role of the House of Lords.

The issue of this debate has not arisen particularly because of recent events, but has been a long time coming. As the noble and learned Lord, Lord Wallace, mentioned, there was a very interesting debate in 1994, when the wonderful former law officer Lord Simon of Glaisdale set out with clarity that the House of Lords had absolute, unfettered power to reject secondary legislation. He was followed by my successor as Leader of the House, my noble friend Lord Salisbury, who accepted Lord Simon’s proposition but then set out clearly the way that conventions had influenced how the House operated. It is a debate well worth rereading, but in the end it demonstrated to me that the conventions were not powerful or clear enough to be an acceptable way to run matters in the House as it is now constituted. It may well have been when the House was mainly hereditary but not now in a House with so much greater political wisdom and experience.

That was one reason why, in my royal commission report some 15 years ago—when I was an opposition Member but was supported by all parties at the time—I recommended that we changed the way that secondary legislation was dealt with in this House and made a proposal not very dissimilar from option 3 proposed by my noble friend Lord Strathclyde.

Secondary legislation is here to stay. It is important to remember the advantages which government, Parliament and society derive from the existence of delegated powers. Ministers and other statutory authorities are able to legislate by secondary legislation on detailed points within the limits of the delegated power in the original Act. In consequence, Bills can be restricted to their essentials, Parliament can concentrate on the key principles and Acts will be better drafted and understood. There is less need for subsequent corrective amendments to primary legislation. Secondary legislation can be amended or replaced much more easily than primary legislation.

In my royal commission report, we said that the number of statutory instruments had increased substantially over the last 100 years, but my noble friend Lord Strathclyde reports that the number has stabilised since then. Nevertheless, it is important that they are dealt with effectively. The proposal before us is to give the House of Lords not less but more influence over secondary legislation. In my view, it is ironical that the present powers of the House of Lords are more absolute over secondary legislation than they are over primary legislation, but we have got by because of the conventions, which, as I indicated, some of us felt were at breaking point even 15 years ago.

Over the years, all Governments have got secondary legislation passed in the House of Lords, even when the House of Lords would have preferred to ask the House of Commons to think again. My noble friend’s proposal would change all that and allow the House to ask the Commons and the Government to think again, and thus give the House a revising function over secondary legislation that it at present lacks by contrast with its role in relation to primary legislation. The proposal before us is to give the House of Lords more power and influence over secondary legislation, which in the right circumstances they should use.

These proposals are entirely consistent with our constitutional practice. The Lords’ role is to review and, if not satisfied, to ask the House of Commons to think again. The Commons’ role is to think again but in the end to decide. Recent events indicate that it is a course that can be effective. However, our democratic system requires the House of Commons to prevail.

House of Lords: Strathclyde Review

Lord Wakeham Excerpts

Thursday 17th December 2015 Lords Chamber

[Baroness Stowell of Beeston]

I am hugely grateful to the noble Lord for that very important contribution. My noble friend has drawn on some of the extensive work done over the past decade or more by the commission chaired by my noble friend Lord Wakeham. The noble Lord, Lord Butler, is right; my noble friend Lord Strathclyde has come forward with a recommendation that deserves proper consideration, and I really hope that that is what this House will give it.

[Lord Wakeham (Con)]

The noble Lord, Lord Butler, has pointed out that we recommended something like my noble friend Lord Strathclyde’s third consideration. I was on the Opposition Benches at the time of the report, if I recall rightly. We made that recommendation because we wanted a better way for this House to discuss statutory legislation. It was deliberately designed to do that and, from talking around the House, I know that a lot of people believe that such a proposal is right. While I understand that Front-Benchers have their role in these matters, there is a great deal more support in this House for a proposal of this sort; my noble friend Lady Stowell can take comfort from that. I hope that she will consult widely with people before we finally reach a decision.

[Baroness Stowell of Beeston]

I am grateful to my noble friend for his remarks, and I very much take on board his advice about my approach over the next few weeks.

House of Lords Reform

Lord Wakeham Excerpts

Tuesday 15th September 2015 Lords Chamber

[Lord Wakeham (Con)]

My Lords, getting up to speak at this stage of the debate, I find that there have been so many interesting points that different people have made that I feel like abandoning what I was going to say and trying to comment on what other people have said; but I will resist that and try to say what I originally intended.

First of all we ought to say that, in spite of what everybody says, this place still does a pretty good job in what it is supposed to do. I do not think we should run ourselves down so much that people think we are a complete shower, as some people might have implied. Secondly, I accept that there are too many Peers in the House of Lords for us to do as effective a job as we ought to; we do not need as many Peers as we have. Therefore, if we could think of some ways of dealing with that, it would be right.

I congratulate the Leader of the House on her speech; I thought it was absolutely excellent. She employed the right tone for trying to see whether we could have some sensible discussions on what are extremely difficult issues. We have had various attempts over the years; and I see a former Lord Chancellor sitting over there who was very much involved in removing the hereditary Peers from this House. We ended up then saying that we needed 100 of them here, and as a matter of fact, the 100 who remained kept the House going. They were the hardest-working Peers in the whole place. Thank God we did that, but we did not succeed on that basis in reducing the numbers of people who regularly turned up. The leadership of my noble friend the Leader of the House has brought a highlight on the retirement of Members, but there is nothing new about that. Members have been able to retire for hundreds of years: we just do not turn up; we do not come. We all could have retired long ago if we had wanted to, but putting this emphasis on it has made people start to think about the numbers, and it is to her credit that that has been done.

The new law that criminals can no longer sit in this House, while an entirely creditable thing, is not—I sincerely hope—going to change the numbers significantly in the future. I hope the House will indulge me if I go back to 15 years ago, when I produced a royal commission report that a lot of people said was very good—it was balanced; it was this and that and the other thing—and then they did sweet nothing about it. It is interesting to reflect on why that was the case: the reason was that we had attempted in the royal commission to find a balanced solution that gave something to everybody. Actually, however, nobody—but nobody worth while—was prepared to compromise in any way. The result was to go on as we were. The lesson there is that we must find a consensus. The Prime Minister and Government are absolutely right in not bringing forward substantial legislation to reform this House until we can achieve some form of consensus. That is what we must do, and that means everybody will not get what they absolutely want. They will get some but not all of it.

What do we do now? As I listened to the suggestions, I should have made a list. On one side would have been those that require legislation. Forget about those—they will not happen for the next few years—so what can the House do without legislation? There is a great deal more we could do to find solutions if we set about that properly. They will not be perfect solutions and they will be, in my view, only temporary. It will be five or 10 years before any reform of this House comes into effect. It will probably be 10 years from now, even if it starts in the next Parliament. However, there are a lot of things we could do to deal with the numbers. My noble friend the Leader is absolutely right. She should work together with the other leaders of the parties to see whether we can work out some practical, sensible solutions. All sorts of things to do with allowances and so on can be done.

It would not be sensible for me to suggest in detail what should be done because once you start those sorts of negotiation, as with the reform of Europe, if you announce your final objectives then everybody wants to criticise them. We should genuinely have negotiations between the parties to see whether we could find practical solutions to deal with some of the problems. I am certainly prepared to write a letter to my noble friend to set out some of my thoughts on that but it is unhelpful to start a discussion by saying what you want to achieve at the end of it. We will not achieve everything but there is no reason why this House cannot do a number of things. We must find a majority that want to do them. In the interests of Parliament and recognising that we do a good job, I say that there are too many of us here—that is my recommendation to my noble friend.

Proposed Changes to the Standing Orders of the House of Commons

Lord Wakeham Excerpts

Tuesday 21st July 2015 Lords Chamber

Surely it would be a gross dereliction of our duty as a House if, in a few months or a year or even later, we were presented with a constitutional difficulty that, because of the failure to properly examine the issues now, we were at a loss on how to resolve it. That would be irresponsible and a recipe for constitutional chaos. I have made clear on more than one occasion from this Dispatch Box that we are and will continue to be a responsible Opposition. I ask the noble Baroness to ensure that we also have a responsible Government and to accept the wise and moderate proposal of the noble Lord, Lord Butler.

[Lord Wakeham (Con)]

My Lords, I have spent a great deal of my political life in government, receiving—and normally taking—the advice of the noble Lord, Lord Butler. He knows, because I have told him, that on this occasion I am not going to agree with him.

I agree that this is a very important issue. The West Lothian question has been around for a long time, and if there were an easy answer or an answer that satisfied everybody it would have been settled years ago. The Government’s proposals should be given a try, but the Government are absolutely right in saying that their proposals should be reviewed after 12 months. These proposals do not alter the rights and responsibilities of the House of Lords in any way; they alter the Standing Orders of the House of Commons. These proposals are a manifesto commitment of the Conservative Party which recently won a general election. That must be treated with respect by the House of Lords, which also ought to be cautious in seeking to interfere with the workings of the House of Commons.

I accept that there are strongly held views on these issues. My advice would be for the House to accept the offer of the Leader of the House for a full debate on the matter in September, or as soon as it can be arranged, assuming that that offer is still open should the House seek to resolve the matter this afternoon, which in my view would be a mistake. It is at the time of that debate that we should decide whether the House of Lords should offer to take part in a Joint Committee of both Houses, but I have to say that I am doubtful. As I understand it, the House of Commons is yet to make a decision to change its Standing Orders and it would be premature for us to seek to tell it what to do or to interfere in the middle of its deliberations.