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Address in Reply to Her Majesty's Most Gracious Speech

My Lords, the only disadvantage that occurs to me of having subject days for the debates on the Queen's Speech is that it puts an issue that over-arches all the subjects into an impasse. I shall speak about over-legislation, which is a profound issue. Before doing so, perhaps I may first say briefly that I am grateful to the noble Baroness, Lady Kennedy of The Shaws, for her comments on identity cards, which is an issue close to my heart and to these Benches. I was grateful, too, that my noble friend Lord Goodhart referred to legal aid and the potential impact on the integrity and independence of my profession of solicitors by allowing solicitors' firms to be capitalist entities—that is, owned by unrelated investors. The Charities Bill is covered by tonight's broad subject area and, as one who sat through 34 hours of debate, I view its return with some ambivalence, although it is better that we have that Bill on the statute book early. Many amendments and improvements to it were made and I hope that they will greatly shorten our further deliberations. The quantity of legislation tends to be overlooked as we plough through Bill after Bill. The Queen's Speech mentioned 43 Bills and six draft Bills. There are nine Home Office crime Bills of one type or another to add to the 35—or is it 40?—that have been introduced since 1997. If legislation alone achieved its purpose, we would have no crime today. The volume of criminal legislation and the creation of new criminal offences has been profligate. We would have no need for further legislation. But in truth there seems to have been an inverse proportion between legislation and the ills to which much of it is addressed. I went to the Library today to obtain the latest statistics, which are in respect of 2003. In that year, we passed 13,407 pages of new law—4,073 pages of Acts, 9,334 for subsidiary legislation. That represents between 8,000 and 9,000 pages of net additional new law. One does not need to be a soothsayer or a wise person to realise that no culture can withstand, year after year, that level of new law making, because all of it creates new demands on the segments of our society to which it is directed and the creation of more advisers, consultants and so on. Statistics are not easily found for the Continent, but we legislate at about two-and-a-half times the rate of Germany, three times the rate of Switzerland and five times the rate of Sweden. I have not found any country that has anything like our level of legislation. Why has that come about? It is due to a grossly over-centralised state, a governmental and electoral system that delivers disproportionate majorities, a patronage system, referred to by the noble Lord, Lord Elton, that ties in a large number of men and women in the Commons, a whipping system and production line legislation that supports a "phoney mandate", whereby huge manifestos are justified in terms of the vast amount of law that comes in their wake. The broad effects are of complication, intrusiveness, bureaucracy and an immense increase in specialist advisers and consultants. We are creating a world fit for lawyers and not all of us are happy about it. The impact on the citizen is crucial and the bulimic legislative tradition that has become ours is responsible for much citizen disenchantment and lack of democratic health. So much of the legislation that we pass is indigestible and incomprehensible. The impact can be disabling when its intent is to help and enable, and it is distancing and disconnecting. The impersonality and lack of ownership of so much legislation is itself a problem that we have not begun to contend with. So much of our legislation is unjust in that those who are eventually caught and prosecuted feel resentful that the world at large has been untouched. It is commonplace that the police and other enforcement authorities are in a great bind when trying to keep up with the law that we thrust on them. I have observed the parliamentary impact even in my short seven years here. Legislation—particularly subsidiary legislation—is not properly scrutinised. Parliamentarians feel increasingly incompetent to take an active part in the passage of Bills. What should we do? First, we need to take a long hard look at the impact of so much of the legislation that we produce. Although I am reluctant to suggest a royal commission, I believe that the difficult and fundamental series of interlocking problems might warrant the creation of one. We had the Renton report in 1975 and the Hansard Society report in 1992. We have had major debates in this place in 1994, 1996, 1998 and 2001, but we have not come near to cracking the cultural problems that I am trying to address. We need to consult more. We need to get out the protocol on consultation that the Government nobly passed a couple of years ago and make sure that it is applied. It is not being applied at the moment. We need to ensure that consultation goes down to the grass roots because too often the only consultation is with umbrella groups that are frequently not truly representative of the people they purport to represent. The time scale for consultation is wholly unrealistic in many cases. We need to deliberate more, and more effectively in Parliament. The proposals for a 60-day rule and many of the proposals in the Hunt report are more a reflection of the managerial ethos of the present Government than of the wisdom of what we should be doing. We need to give more attention to public citizenship education. I pay tribute to the Government for having put that into schools, but more needs to be done. We need to have citizen summaries of new law. We need to make sure that those issues that are of popular concern are understood by the public, and that time, money and effort is spent on ensuring that that happens. Many of the problems in relation to the European Union have to do with the complete incomprehension on the part of most people as to how that barbarically complicated set of interlocking institutions actually works. Unless we do something about that, it is a farce in democratic terms. Above all we need to be practical in our understanding of how the legislation we pass in this place will work. I return again to the issue of decentralisation without which we will never get near to controlling the extraordinary outpouring of legislative effluent which year by year showers on the unsuspecting public. Finally, I come to respect. It is a big word. Yes, we need respect, but we in this place also need to respect the public. I do not honestly think that we do that. If we respected the situation in which the vast majority of the public find themselves in relation to the laws that we so merrily pass, we would not be quite so cavalier in our approach and in the volume of laws that are passed. Inflation of legislation is as dangerous as inflation of money. To pretend that by laws passed in this place we can cure every social ill is about as wise as saying that one should take an antibiotic for every cold and illness. Ultimately antibiotics become ineffectual, as has so much of our legislation.