Ministerial Visits: Travel Costs
Debate between Lord Wallace of Saltaire and Lord Berkeley(9 years, 3 months ago)
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Lord Wallace of Saltaire (LD)
My Lords, visits are a key part of ministerial roles. The costs of ministerial visits within the UK are not held centrally and are a matter for individual departments.
Lord Berkeley (Lab)
I am grateful to the Minister for that. He says that ministerial visits are very important. Perhaps he can help me with one such visit, on 30 January, by Claire Perry, the Rail Minister, to Hastings to attend a rail summit, as they called it, to promote the extension of the high-speed Javelin service from Ashford to Hastings. Apparently a special train was put on from Ashford to pick up other PPCs along the route, which, in my estimate, probably cost £50,000. The whole event was covered in Conservative Party posters and I do not imagine that anybody who was not a member of the party was there. Can he explain whether it is part of the ministerial duty to go canvassing like this? If it was paid for by the Department for Transport in whole or part, how will the Conservative Party reimburse it?
Lord Wallace of Saltaire
My Lords, I am not, of course, aware of the incident to which the noble Lord refers. There are well established practices, which, as far as I am aware, have not changed under this Government, for dividing between ministerial roles and political activities that Ministers may undertake while visiting particular constituencies. Paragraph 10.14 of my 2010 copy of the Ministerial Code says:
“Where a visit is a mix of political and official engagements, it is important that the department and the Party each meet a proper proportion of the actual cost”.
Rights of the Sovereign and the Duchy of Cornwall Bill [HL]
Debate between Lord Wallace of Saltaire and Lord Berkeley(10 years, 7 months ago)
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Lord Wallace of Saltaire (LD)
My Lords, I have it in command from Her Majesty the Queen and His Royal Highness the Prince of Wales to acquaint the House that they, having been informed of the purport of the Rights of the Sovereign and the Duchy of Cornwall Bill [HL], have consented to place their prerogative and interests, so far as they are affected by the Bill, at the disposal of Parliament for the purpose of the Bill.
Lord Berkeley (Lab)
My Lords, I am very grateful for the Minister’s statement, which means that I can now proceed.
Before I get into the substance of the Bill, noble Lords might be interested to hear that I found out recently that an ancestor of mine, the third Earl of Berkeley, who was later the First Lord of the Admiralty, was a leading member of something called the Kit-Cat Club. I do not know how many noble Lords know about the Kit-Cat Club but in the early 18th century it was one of those organisations—largely a Whig one—which were united in their belief in the authority of Parliament over the monarchy. One has to consider how much has changed.
This Bill proposes comparatively small changes to the relationship between the monarchy and Parliament, and perhaps starts the process of what I hope will be quite a long discussion over the coming years. There are three clauses in the Bill. The first one amends the Sovereign Grant Act 2011 in respect of royal travel. This is a serious issue because there is a question over how many royals and royal duties should receive taxpayer-funded travel, as well as the scrutiny that Parliament has over these arrangements. I have been following this for some years, as noble Lords will probably know, and have noted that Parliament gets less and less detail of how many journeys there are by air and rail and how much they cost.
I noted that Prince Andrew flew to Jeddah for a funeral, chartering his own aircraft at a cost of £86,000 to the public purse, when the return fare for two people, first class, would cost four grand. Is there an argument for having your own plane to go to a funeral when there is a scheduled direct flight? At the other extreme, Princess Anne does an awful lot of good for transport particularly, but I noted that she took a helicopter to visit two gymkhanas in one day. That is fine if you are horsy but is it really necessary that the taxpayer pay for it?
What worries me is that the arrangements seem to have become open-ended. They used to be confined to 12 members of the Royal Family, but I got a Written Answer on 3 September that said:
“It is for Her Majesty The Queen to decide which members of the Royal Family receive support from the Sovereign Grant to meet travel costs”.—[Official Report, 23/9/13; col. WA 441.]
However, there seems to be no proper independent scrutiny where taxpayers’ money is involved. That obsequiousness seems to affect many of the dealings between Parliament and the royal family, and needs to change.
Clause 1 suggests that the costs should be kept under control and scrutinised. Six members seems a good number. Many years ago, when the Queen was a princess, there were probably only six members of the family performing royal duties; should there be any more? Royal travel arrangements, if funded by the taxpayer, should be scrutinised by Parliament in the same way as Ministers’ travel.
Clause 2 addresses two issues. The first is comparatively minor. It seems reasonable that the heir to the Throne should inherit the title of the Duke of Cornwall, whatever their sex. We debated that when discussing the Succession to the Crown Act, and it seems perfectly reasonable.
Turning to the second half of the clause, as a resident of Cornwall, I hear a lot of views about the Duchy, some good, some bad, but there is an awful lot of correspondence. I see the second half of the clause as tidying up some history. I suggest that the present status and structure of the Duchy remains pretty feudal, and that it is intentionally so, as it seems to suit all those involved not to rock the boat and incur what one might call royal displeasure.
We start with a big debate about whether the Duchy is in the private or the public sector. There is secrecy, obfuscation, Crown immunity and a failure to respond to questions. It is worth going back a bit in history. The Duchy has been around for a very long time, but I discovered that the Duchy of Cornwall Act 1860 states:
“All the provisions of the said Act of the ninth year of King George the third now applicable to Her Majesty, her Heirs and Successors, shall be extended and be applicable to the Duke of Cornwall, in like manner as if the same were re-enacted and the Duke of Cornwall were throughout mentioned or referred to where the ‘Kings Majesty’ or ‘His Majesty’ is in the said Act mentioned”.
That means that the Duke of Cornwall is effectively in the position of King of Cornwall. We can debate whether that appeals to the people of Cornwall, but it is confirmed in a preliminary statement by the Duchy of Cornwall in a foreshore dispute in 1856. It suggests that the three Duchy charters are sufficient in themselves to vest in the Duke of Cornwall not only the government of Cornwall but the entire territorial dominion.
It is also interesting to note that, whereas the sheriffs of the counties of Britain swear an oath of allegiance to the sovereign, the Sheriff of Cornwall swears an oath of allegiance to the Duke of Cornwall as sovereign of Cornwall. Those examples appear to provide strong confirmation that the Duchy is a public body and, as such, subject to environmental, housing and other laws. That was confirmed in a judgment concerning Port Navas on the Helford river on the question of whether the Duchy should be subject to environmental legislation. The Duchy lost the case, perhaps influenced by evidence from the Duchy which said that,
“the Duchy is not democratically accountable in any meaningful sense”.
The Duchy is appealing; that appeal is still pending, but it must be comforting for it to have the free advice of the Treasury Solicitor. The man who made the original complaint has to fund his own legal costs; we are funding the Duchy's costs.
There is an issue of tax. The Public Accounts Committee published a report last week which, I thought, was very deferential. I am sure that if I or any other noble Lord had been questioned by the Public Accounts Committee about not paying tax, we would not have received the response that, yes, there ought to be a bit more investigation by the Treasury. The Treasury responded even more deferentially. That was an opportunity lost to get things on a proper footing. Then there is the question of Crown immunity. The Duchy does not pay capital gains tax or corporation tax, and Duchy income is taxed on a voluntary basis. Would not we all like to be taxed on a voluntary basis?
The Duchy accounts state that, in accordance with the memorandum of understanding of 1993, the Prince of Wales pays rent on Highgrove, his house in Gloucestershire. There is no lease in place and, as I understand the evidence given by Sir Bertie Ross for the Duchy, the Prince is entitled to the income from the Duchy, so it would be a matter of the Prince taking money from one pocket and placing it in another, so he does not actually pay rent. He can claim tax relief on that proportion of the rent which relates to Highgrove being used for public purposes, so it appears that he is claiming tax relief in respect of rent which is paid in theory but not actually paid or which, having been paid, is returned to him. I hope that noble Lords can follow that.
On the issue of housing, Mr Alan Davis, who lives in the Isles of Scilly, wants the right to buy his leasehold property from the Duchy. He is challenging the Prince on his decision in the Prince’s Council to resist that because the Leasehold Reform Act does not apply to the Duchy because of Crown immunity. There is an awful lot of confusion and documents have been lost. Mr Davis’s case comes before the tribunal in Truro, so I shall not comment on it further. It seems wrong that people who live in houses leased from the Duchy cannot buy their own houses in the way that other people can because the Duchy claims that it wishes to manage the built and national environment. There is legislation to do that. The Leasehold Reform Act may not be perfect, but the exclusion of the Duchy from it is a matter of concern.
The next issue is the rents that the Duchy charges for its properties. According to Richard McCarthy, who is chair of the Duchy Tenants Association, average Duchy rents in 2011-12 were £130, whereas council rents averaged £70 and housing association rents averaged £100. The average household income on the Scillies is just £277 a week, compared with the national average of £390, so those rents are very hard for tenants in the Duchy to afford.
My last example is something called bona vacantia. It applies to people who die in Cornwall without a will. Their estate then goes to the Duchy. It is worth about £500,000 a year. I think that the people of Cornwall think that that money should be spent on good causes in Cornwall, but it appears from the Duchy accounts that it is distributed to Strata Florida in Wales, Gordonstoun School, which Prince Charles attended, and a Kennington residents’ association. Because the money came from Cornwall, there is a feeling that the funds should be distributed to good causes in Cornwall.
I have been able to give just a snapshot of the obfuscations, uncertainties and spurious claims by the Duchy of being in the private sector or in the public sector and having Crown immunity, which seems to vary on the time and the subject, all coupled with the secrecy from both the Duchy and, sad to say, the Government, whose obsequiousness sometimes seems more appropriate to a feudal era, when the Prime Minister would get his head chopped off if he did not do whatever the sovereign or the heir to the Throne wanted.
I have had lots of support from the people of Cornwall about this; many of them fear that they cannot speak out, and one can understand why. So my solution is to separate the Duchy estate from any historical link with the monarchy and turn it into a public trust for the benefit of the people of Cornwall and the Isles of Scilly. There is over 600 years of history to unravel and that is not easy, so this would need secondary legislation and perhaps some primary as well, but the opportunity should be taken to clear up all the anomalies about the status of the Duke of Cornwall and his rights. In this context, my Bill would ensure that the Prince of Wales should no longer be King of Cornwall in the feudal sense. I think that he should retain his links with Cornwall as he does with Wales—but he does not own Wales. That is the purpose of that clause.
Clause 3 has rather been overtaken by events. It concerns the issue of consent from the Queen or the Prince of Wales before a Bill receives Royal Assent. The Minister kindly indicated the consent at the start of this debate. I do not need to go into this topic in any particular detail because, in evidence to the Political and Constitutional Reform Committee on 31 October, the Clerks of both Houses of Parliament basically said that Parliament could change that; it would not need any legislation but if it wished to stop this, it could do it. To demonstrate why we need to change the current arrangements, I have a couple of examples of cases where approval was not signified for a Bill. The Clerks’ evidence is that this has happened twice. Although the legislation was not refused—this is a deferential way of “not saying no but meaning no”—two Private Member’s Bills were affected. One was the Second Reading of the Military Actions against Iraq (Parliamentary Approval) Bill on 16 April 1999, in which Tam Dalyell tried to require Parliament to give approval of declarations of war, which did not go ahead because the Prime Minister of the day almost certainly advised the Queen that it would not be a good idea to go ahead, perhaps because he might want to bomb Iraq without getting the approval of Parliament —we can debate that. The other was the Third Reading of the Pig Husbandry Bill on 3 May 1991. I do not know whether the Royal Family keep pigs in Windsor Castle, but why that did not go ahead I also do not know. All I can do is quote John Kirkhope, a public notary and chartered insurer who has given me a lot of help with this information:
“I am surprised Parliamentarians tolerate this situation which means, in effect, if you introduce a Bill to Parliament someone taps you on the shoulder and says you need the consent of the Duke of Cornwall because it may affect his private interests!”.
So I hope that when the Political and Constitutional Reform Committee reports it will be a lot more robust and less deferential, and will recommend the end of this feudal period.
In conclusion, there is much that needs doing, sorting out and cleaning up in many areas of the relationship between the monarch, the Prince of Wales and Parliament. I hope that the constitutional monarchy survives and prospers but at the moment the Prince of Wales in particular is put in an impossible position in seeking to do what he believes is best in a kind of feudal environment that started 600 years ago but in the 21st century is not appropriate. Change is necessary, but we have to get away from this deferential relationship of obfuscation and silence that is hampering the debate. I hope that the Bill, covering only a small part of that relationship, will start an open debate and eventually some very necessary change. I beg to move.
Public Services: Private Sector Companies
Debate between Lord Wallace of Saltaire and Lord Berkeley(10 years, 8 months ago)
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Lord Berkeley (Lab)
My Lords, can the Government explain why, on the recently announced east coast main line franchise, they have allowed the state railways of the Netherlands, Germany and France to bid but not the directly operated railways that are owned by this Government? What is the difference?
Lord Wallace of Saltaire
My Lords, that is a little bit on the edge of this Question. However, as a frequent user of the east coast railway line, I know exactly where the noble Lord is coming from.
Public Bodies Bill [HL]
Debate between Lord Wallace of Saltaire and Lord Berkeley(12 years, 7 months ago)
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Lord Berkeley
My Lords, could I ask the Minister to explain further the purpose of Amendment 55, which adds Dover Harbour Board to Schedule 5? It is a bit extraordinary to include one port from among 120 or so in this country, most of which are trust ports. I declare an interest as a commissioner of a trust port in Cornwall. Why add one port to a list including the Environment Agency, British Waterways Board and all these other bodies that we have debated, on the basis that the local MP thought that it was a good idea? Is this a precedent for local MPs around the country to come up with ideas for privatisation or mutualisation of their ports, and to come before the Ministers saying “Let us add this to the list and have fun”? As the Minister said, there is a perfectly good route for privatisation of ports in the Ports Act 1991. I would be grateful if he could explain the purpose behind this amendment.
Lord Wallace of Saltaire
My Lords, I thank the noble Baroness, Lady Royall of Blaisdon, for her kind words about the way in which the Government have dealt with this Bill. Unavoidably, a commitment to prune the proliferation of public bodies over the last two generations meant that the Bill was very complex. Therefore, I believe that a period of digestion in both Houses was justified. It was a complex Bill and we have done our best to digest the criticism of it.
Anticipating that there would be criticism concerning RDAs, I spent some time last weekend reading up on regional growth theory and a whole range of other things. I am still not entirely sure whether I hold to the spatial equilibrium theory or to the agglomeration growth theory, or whether I think that economics claims to be unduly scientific and sometimes does not entirely understand what is happening on the ground.
I can assure the noble Baroness, Lady Quin, that this Government are strongly committed to reducing regional disparities. None of us can be happy that the gap between London and the south-east and, above all, the north and north-west of England, in terms of incomes, house prices and even life expectancy, has widened so much under the successive Governments of different parties over the last 20 to 25 years. The regional policies of the last Government did not reverse that trend. As noble Lords will know, we are now in the process of setting up a regional growth fund and local economic partnerships based on city regions rather than the wider regions. I have to say, looking at the Yorkshire region, that the wider Leeds region is rather different from the wider Hull region, but that is an area that we shall continue to debate as these new measures are put in place. More will be announced in the autumn Financial Statement.
On the question of the European regional development fund, the Government have of course paid attention to it as it is an important part of this. The programmes will now be guided by local management committees which oversee ERDF investment and assess progress. These committees draw their membership from government departments and a wide range of local partners, including local authorities, LEPs, educational institutions, the voluntary sector and members of the business community. So the LEPs will play an active role in the delivery of European regional development funds, both through their membership of the local management committees and as potential applicants for funding. I can assure the noble Baroness that we do not intend to let that pot of money stay unused.
The noble Lord, Lord Berkeley, asked about Dover Harbour Board. One has to say that Dover is a rather larger and more important harbour than some of those in Cornwall with which he is concerned, so the argument for making an exception of Dover partly rests upon the importance of that port compared to many others. I accept that to some extent this is an anomaly, the result of an extremely powerful and well organised local campaign. We shall see how far this provides an innovation that may spread elsewhere. The noble Lord may think that a Conservative MP supporting a people’s port proposal is slightly counterintuitive. That is the degree of innovation that we are concerned with but, again, we shall see how this develops. There was very powerful feeling within the town, and in a democratic country one should occasionally—perhaps frequently—take the strength of local opinion into account.
Having answered some of the points raised, I beg to move that these amendments be now agreed to.
Demonstrations in the Vicinity of Parliament (Removal of Authorisation Requirements) Bill [HL]
Debate between Lord Wallace of Saltaire and Lord Berkeley
Lord Wallace of Saltaire
They were not only there but on The Mall, as I attempted to walk at speed from the Cabinet Office to Tothill Street the day before the royal wedding and it took me nearly 20 minutes. I am well aware that policing is by consent and discretion in this country. On special occasions, as in the run-up to a royal wedding, we accept obstruction of the footpath for a limited period. That is what happened then. On whether obstruction of the footpath for extended periods is also acceptable, we are absolutely talking about the balance between the very small number of people who have occupied Parliament Square Gardens and the footpath adjoining it and the very large number of people who come through.
We all welcome that very large number of people. I have had an office on the West Front for some years and I am used to hearing people singing hymns, or hundreds of schoolchildren producing a substantial number of decibels as they cheerily march past, and a whole range of other demonstrations. I do not mind that noise as it comes through; I much prefer it to the more regular noise of the heavy traffic. That is part of what Parliament should be about. We shall return to the exact question of the measures which are now proposed to replace SOCPA next Thursday. I say simply that those measures are to have a small controlled area in which certain activities—erecting tents and the unauthorised use of loudhailers—are prohibited.
Lord Berkeley
My interpretation of what the noble Lord has just said is that if the establishment approves of people camping, it is all right, but if it does not, it is not all right. Is that true?
Lord Wallace of Saltaire
No, we are talking about timescale. This democracy encampment has gone on for a very extended period, and the Brian Haw situation for even longer. Of course one has to use discretion on certain occasions, but people who put up their picnic tables and chairs for one overnight, cheery encampment is not at all the same thing as people who erect permanent tents over months and years at a time, which then extend to the sort of huts which we now see opposite us that are almost permanent erections. That is of a different scale, and the timescale is fundamentally different.
We argue that what is proposed in the Police Reform and Social Responsibility Bill is a proportionate and targeted response which is the minimum necessary to deal with the particular misuse of tents and structures on Parliament Square Gardens and the footways. For the rest, protest in this area will henceforth be governed by the same laws as govern protest elsewhere. We think that returning to that is the appropriate course. By removing the SOCPA rules against protest as such, we are saying that if people want to protest for days, weeks and months, including candlelit vigils by nuns or others, they can. What they cannot do is erect tents and/or other long-term structures to do so. So while the Government cannot and will not support this Bill in the other place as it stands, we welcome and urge continued debate.
I shall now deal with some of the wider issues which are of clear interest to Members of the House about the future of Parliament Square and the way in which it fits in to the central democratic space which is the Palace of Westminster and its environs. The noble Lord, Lord Tyler, talked about the need to break the bureaucratic logjam of the division of responsibility between Westminster Council, the Greater London Authority and various other authorities, which has made it very difficult to deal with these issues. A number of noble Lords talked about noise as a nuisance, and I reinforce everything that has been said about traffic noise being one of the largest problems we have to face. I look out of my windows on to Old Palace Yard, and the heavy trucks that pass by extremely close are also a potential security risk. The reason those heavy steel Corus structures are in place is because there is a real security risk.
Parliament Square is, as some noble Lords have remarked, a traffic island, surrounded by a traffic roundabout. The questions raised in the project for World Squares for All of one or more sides of Parliament Square being closed to traffic would answer the point raised by the noble Lord, Lord Cormack, about pedestrian access to the centre, give us a much larger space and give us something which we all, as pedestrians, enjoy in Trafalgar Square. When, as a Liberal Democrat opposition spokesman I raised this question on one occasion, the noble Baroness, Lady Trumpington, objected that closing off two sides of Parliament Square would inhibit her ability to arrive for weddings at St Margaret’s in a car. I regret to remind her that that would indeed be the case, but there would be compensating advantages to a larger number of others. We cannot restore Parliament Square to the glory which the noble Lord, Lord Cormack, and others evoke without restricting traffic.
On the question of sessional orders, which other speakers have also raised, I point out that the Commons no longer has a sessional order. The order, in its very grand-sounding statements, does not actually enforce any action outside the Palace of Westminster. It might indeed be time, therefore, to consider whether it is desirable to continue the grand language of the sessional order, given that it gives rise, as I have discovered when answering questions on this, to a number of misunderstandings about its potential use.
We welcome the frequency of well managed demonstrations, and in all that we do here we want the maximum number of people to come into the Palace and to appreciate how the Palace, Westminster Hall, Westminster Abbey and the surrounding area are a central part of English history. We welcome the opportunity that visits—particularly of the younger generation—to this area give to educate a new generation about English history and the growth of democracy in it. Although I am not saying that the Government support this Bill in another place, I very much hope that those who have spoken in this debate and others will continue the debate about how this world heritage site—this place that we love so much—should best be redesigned and rearranged so that we can welcome the largest number of visitors and the largest number of people who want to express their views in a free society.