Debate on the Address

Stephen Dorrell Excerpts

Wednesday 9th May 2012 Commons Chamber

[Mr David Davis (Haltemprice and Howden) (Con)]

It is a pleasure to follow the right hon. Member for Tottenham (Mr Lammy). While I may differ with his analysis, there is never any doubt that he holds his views passionately. He certainly supports his constituency and community passionately, and has done so in the past several years in which I have watched him in this House.

Let me say to the Prime Minister that it is also a pleasure to talk about the real Queen’s Speech as against the one that I and others proposed last week. This Queen’s Speech has enormous merits to it, particularly in the context of growth. I am particularly supportive, as he will be unsurprised to hear, of his proposals on bank reforms, competition law, and joint enterprise law reform, including labour law reform. He will be happy to hear me mention those, but I am afraid that it goes downhill from here on in. [Hon. Members: “That was less than a minute!”] Well, I will make up the whole minute by saying that the Government can be proud of most of their record in the past couple of years on the issues of liberty and justice, which the Prime Minister knows I hold very dear. Their actions on identity cards, on cutting down on the amount of detention without charge, and on the misuse of counter-terrorism stop-and-search powers are all matters of pride for them.

Beyond that, however, I have three concerns: one about a constitutional issue, one about state power, and one about justice. Let me start with the constitutional issue on which the right hon. Member for Tottenham finished—the House of Lords. One of my concerns about our whole approach to the House of Lords is that we are arguing about its composition without worrying enough about its purpose, which we have not done enough to consider. There is a great deal of talk about the House of Lords as a revising and reforming Chamber, but it has a much greater function than that. Historically, the House of Lords has been a serious check on excessive Executive power. It was a check on the Government of Margaret Thatcher when she had a very large majority, on the Government of Tony Blair, and on the Government of the right hon. Member for Kirkcaldy and Cowdenbeath (Mr Brown), and no doubt it will be a check on this Government as time goes on.

It is very important in Britain that we have this check, because we are different in one respect from most other democracies. Without any separation of Executive and legislature, the power of the Executive in this House means that this House is less good than it could be at defending the rights of individuals when the Executive impinge too much on them. We saw that very often with the previous Government. There were a great number of occasions when I am sure that many Labour Members did not want to support some of their Government’s more illiberal actions. That is why the House of Lords is incredibly important.

[Mr Stephen Dorrell (Charnwood) (Con)]

My right hon. Friend is making a case from a Conservative point of view against reforming the make-up of the House of Lords. If the House of Lords has the distinguished record of preventing excessive use of Executive power that he is suggesting, why does he think that Margaret Thatcher’s first Lord Chancellor, Lord Hailsham, delivered a speech roughly 50 years ago in which he said that we did not have sufficient checks and balances in our constitution, which he characterised as an elective dictatorship?

[Mr Davis]

I am grateful to my right hon. Friend, because he goes right to the central point. The House of Lords is not perfect, and there are many things that it has wrongly allowed to happen. I am in favour of reform of the House of Lords, but we must be very careful to get it right. If, in our reform, we do away with, or weaken or mitigate to any great extent, the check that it provides, that check will never be returned, because no Government will ever bring back a restraint on their own powers.

I think it was the Deputy Prime Minister who characterised his preferred state of the House of Lords as being one that more reflected the political composition of the House of Commons. That is precisely what I would not want it to do. A House of Lords that exactly reflected the political composition of the House of Commons would not be very much of a check on the Executive, and that would be a really serious problem. We must be very careful about what we do.

I do not believe that a referendum, of itself, will solve the problem, because it is a subtle and difficult matter and will be very hard to argue in public. However, it is very important.

--- Later in debate ---

[Mr Stephen Dorrell (Charnwood) (Con)]

The hon. Member for Hartlepool (Mr Wright) was on stronger ground when he talked about the importance of policies and opportunities to create growth to address the unemployment that affects his constituency and many others. Although I did not agree with many of his policy prescriptions, I agreed with his definition of the challenge—I think, from his speech earlier, that my right hon. Friend the Prime Minister did, too. However, I did not follow the hon. Gentleman into the closing stages of his speech because he is simply wrong to say that the Government do not have a clear view about what they are trying to do.

I welcome the Queen’s Speech precisely because it refocuses the minds of hon. Members and supporters of the Conservative and Liberal Democrat parties, and more importantly, of those beyond the political world, on the objectives that we set ourselves when the coalition Government were formed. To me, that is the key win in the Queen’s Speech.

Some members of my party have, in the past few weeks, and particularly in the past few days, sought opportunities to strengthen the Conservative flavour, as they see it, in the coalition. I want to offer one or two responses to that, based on the Queen’s Speech, and comment on one or two specific proposals.

As a lifelong Conservative, I have no problem in arguing the case for Conservative ideas. However, I have a problem with those who seek to reinterpret the Conservative case excessively narrowly. There is nothing in the Queen’s Speech that cannot be argued full heartedly as a mainstream Conservative proposal. All the measures can be traced to proper Conservative roots and, indeed, to roots in the Liberal Democrat tradition.

There has been much debate, including in the House this afternoon, about House of Lords reform and whether there is a proper Conservative narrative for it. I argue strongly that there is. I intervened on my right hon. Friend the Member for Haltemprice and Howden (Mr Davis) to remind him that it is nearly 50 years since Lord Hailsham, who happened to be Margaret Thatcher’s first Lord Chancellor, described our system of government as possessing inadequate checks and balances on the powers of the Executive. He described it as an “elective dictatorship”, so when my right hon. Friend the Leader of the House of Lords is quoted in today’s Financial Times as arguing the case for reform of another place on the ground that it will make that Chamber,

“‘stronger, more independent’ and better able ‘to challenge the decisions of the Commons’”,

I allow myself a gentle cheer. I think that Lord Hailsham, from his grave, would cheer the prospect of our seeking a structure that allows Parliament to be a more effective check on the Executive.

We either believe in the case for less and better government, and more checks and balances in government —as a Conservative, I do; that Governments should be subject to checks and balances and accountability is a core Conservative belief—or we do not. My right hon. Friend the Leader of the House of Lords clearly does. I am delighted that the Government, from both Conservative and Liberal Democrat traditions, believe in the case for more effective checks and balances and accountability to Parliament. I look forward to the conversion of that big idea into precise legislation as the Session goes on.

[Mr Elfyn Llwyd (Dwyfor Meirionnydd) (PC)]

I am listening carefully to the right hon. Gentleman, who makes a strong case. I do not know what we will end up with, but does he agree that one way of improving the checks and balances would be through avoiding the strict timetabling of every single measure that comes before the House?

[Mr Dorrell]

I have much sympathy for that point of view. I have been here for perhaps rather more years than I should, but I remember long debates when parliamentary scrutiny was more effective than it often is now. Before the last general election, there were repeated occasions on which complex legislation passed through on a timetable that suited the Government rather than provided for proper parliamentary scrutiny.

There will be those—I am certainly among them—who will look for ways to strengthen the voice of the House of Commons, as we should. I agree with my right hon. Friend the Member for Bermondsey and Old Southwark (Simon Hughes), who referred to the strengthening during this Parliament of the Back-Bench voice, which has been a step forward and a good thing. However, those who look for effective checks within the legislature on Executive enthusiasms do well to look at another place as part of the answer to that, in addition to reform of House of Commons procedure.

Therefore, to those in the Conservative party who ask, “Where is the Conservative provenance for House of Lords reform?” I say, “Read the history books.” I will certainly be uncomfortable if we are manoeuvred into a position in which we appear to defend what I regard as a wholly unacceptable Blairite compromise, which we opposed vigorously at the time of the legislative proposals at the beginning of the Labour Government.

Having said all that, it is clearly true that such reform is an important internal process within the Westminster village, but not the key issue that our constituents look to the Government, the Queen’s Speech and the House to address. To again pick up a theme developed by my right hon. Friend the Member for Bermondsey and Old Southwark, we should remind ourselves that the Government are a coalition. Because they are a coalition, they have a large working majority in the House of Commons, which is a good thing in terms of the stability and strategic purpose it provides. However, the majority is more important in another respect: the two parties that make up the coalition have a broader electoral base in the community outside Westminster than has been the case for any recent Government. We have a stable Government with a clear purpose, which was redefined and re-emphasised in the Queen’s Speech and in the speech of my right hon. Friend the Prime Minister, and not just a Government cobbled together in the immediate aftermath of the last general election.

At the very heart of the purpose of the coalition Government is the intention to create a stable economic base not merely to address the deficit, but to move on from that to create the environment in which growth begins to re-emerge, as the hon. Member for Hartlepool said. The purpose of economic policy is not to make the books balance—as the Prime Minister said over the weekend, it is not an exercise in accountancy—but to create the environment in which interest rates are low, confidence returns, and growth starts the process of creating jobs in the hon. Gentleman’s constituency and elsewhere.

I find the argument of the shadow Chancellor wholly unpersuasive. He appears to believe that we lack a Government appetite to borrow. How a British Government deliver stability in the Europe of 2012 by building on their already excessive borrowing rate and building more borrowing into our public finances is simply beyond me. I believe that that is unrealistic, but more seriously, I also believe that the shadow Chancellor knows it is unrealistic. If he does, it is not only unrealistic, but dishonest.

The purpose that brought the Government together, which enlists the support of every Conservative and Liberal Democrat Member of Parliament, is the prime objective of recreating economic stability to create growth, so that we can deliver the wealth required to deliver improving standards of living and improving public services. How do we do that? The hon. Member for Hartlepool argued that what we need is a state bank that would make better investment decisions than the private banking sector. I do not agree with that.

What I do agree with are the two key Bills in the Queen’s Speech, one of which is the Bill on banking reform, to address some of the failings that have been identified, not just by politicians but by the Governor of the Bank of England last week and by many commentators. One of the learning experiences of the events of 2005-09 was that the banking system did not have proper risk assurance to reduce the risks that the taxpayer ended up picking up. The process of banking reform is important and I welcome the fact that the Government are pressing forward with it.

I also welcome the fact that the Government are pressing forward with the reform and accentuation of competition policy, because I strongly believe that, once the Government’s finances are under control, the real answer to the question of how to recreate growth, confidence and prosperity in the economy is through a banking system that works and a competitive, free-enterprise economy. That is at the heart of the Queen’s Speech. It has obvious provenance in the Conservative tradition, and it has equally obvious provenance in the Liberal Democrat tradition, and that is why this stream of ideas comes together to create a strong coalition Government.

The Government are not, I am pleased to say, just about economics. They also have a broad-based programme for the reform of public service delivery—in which my right hon. Friend the Secretary of State for Education in particular is carrying forward a programme of reform that will deliver strong improvements in our school system and our wider education system as a result of the ideas that we share across the coalition. We also have a shared commitment to the promotion of environmental policies through the Green investment bank. That such ideas are shared across the coalition is the key point that I want to draw out of the Queen’s Speech.

I wish to focus on one specific policy—social care. This is a more techy point than a political ideas point, but it is an extremely important point from the perspective of the people who rely on our health and social care system. There was, of course, an expectation of legislation on social care reform in this Session. What we now have is a commitment in the Queen’s Speech to a draft Bill reflecting a continuing thinking process within the Government—I am pleased to see that the hon. Member for Sutton and Cheam (Paul Burstow), the Minister with responsibility for social care, is in his place. I shall not seek his comments on what I am about to say, but I am glad that he will hear it.

[Tony Baldry]

In the briefing that hon. Members were sent before this debate by organisations including Carers UK, they actually asked for a draft Bill so that it could be properly considered before final legislation was eventually brought forward.

[Mr Dorrell]

My hon. Friend leads me neatly to my next point. It seems to me to be an odd argument to suggest that if the Government have not yet clearly made up their mind precisely how they propose to deliver the important issue of social care reform, it then becomes a source of criticism that there is not a Bill with a commitment to legislate. I am old-fashioned enough—as my hon. Friend suggests most of us interested in this issue are—to think that the most important issue is to deliver a clear policy and then to legislate. I do not criticise the insistence that we have a clear policy before we have a Bill and a commitment to legislate.

I welcome the fact that the process of clarification of policy is continuing, provided that it takes us beyond discussion about funding. While Dilnot made some important points about the need for a fairer system of distributing the cost burden among those who pay for social care—some of those ideas will be part of the eventual conclusion on health and social care—the problem is that he was asked to answer the wrong question, and that is becoming increasingly obvious as the public discussion continues. The question put to Dilnot was how to restructure the payment arrangements for the existing structure of social care. But if we step back from the question of funding and look at how care is actually delivered in each locality—between the social care system, the primary health care system and the community health care system—the inescapable conclusion is that the structure is no longer fit for purpose. It was designed primarily to deliver health care to people who had a burden of disease that was the pattern 30, 40 or 50 years ago, whereas today’s health and care system needs to meet the needs of a very different group of patients. It is a difficult thing to measure, but depending on how one chooses to do so, between two thirds and three quarters of the resources employed in the health and care system are devoted to people with long-term, complex needs. Their requirement is for joined-up care that supports them and enables them to lead lives that are as full as possible during the period of their longer life expectancy.

[Meg Hillier]

As a former carer for two adults with complex needs, I counted that at one point I was dealing with 13 different agencies to provide their care. The right hon. Gentleman seems to suggest that simplification of the system is as important as proper funding. Funding may be a big challenge, but simplification is vital if we are to deliver the domiciliary aspect of care.

[Mr Dorrell]

I entirely agree with the hon. Lady’s view. Reform of social care is not the same thing as reforming the funding system. In my view, we cannot deliver a good value, high quality health and care system just by changing funding flows. What is required is something more fundamental, which is changing the way in which care is delivered in each locality, in order—as the hon. Lady rightly says—to reduce the number of competing, and often non-communicating, bureaucracies in the system.

If the time that the Government are taking will be used to answer the question of how to deliver more integrated, joined-up care, and then how to pay for it, it will be time extremely well spent. If it is simply a delay while we try to solve the problems of how to pay for the existing system, we will continue to ask the wrong, unanswerable question.

On social care, I have made a specific point, but on the Queen’s Speech as a whole, I have made a more important point with a broader political reach. The Government have a clear purpose, both in our economic policy and in our broader views about the type of society that we are seeking to create. It is not a coincidence that my right hon. Friend the Member for Haltemprice and Howden spoke today about liberty and justice, or that the right hon. Member for Bermondsey and Old Southwark focused on the importance of individual responsibility and rights as opposed to the collective tradition that comes from parties on the political left. I support the Queen’s Speech and this Conservative-led coalition, because it already has achievements of which both Conservatives and Liberal Democrats can be proud. The Queen’s Speech makes clear the continuing commitment on the part of the Government to build on and follow through the achievements of our first two years.