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Address in Reply to Her Majesty's Most Gracious Speech

My Lords, the background to the gracious Speech is of course that the Government have won the election, and we recognise and congratulate them on that. In doing so, however, we note that it was on the lowest popular vote ever. My speech will go broader than the suggested topics for this evening's debate, and I do not expect an answer from the Minister on some of the areas which lie outside his brief. Nevertheless, I want to pick up some key issues that are in the gracious Speech and that flow from the Bills set out in it. I shall start with the constitution. Many noble Lords will have heard the report this morning from a group operating through the Hansard Society about the disconnection between Parliament and the people. In so far as we are to have a constitutional Bill, I hope very much that when it comes, its contents will be robust enough so that it is not a Bill which merely tinkers at the edges with bits and pieces. I want to raise a few points that are important to me. The first is party political in that I disagree with the removal of the hereditary Peers from all sides of the Chamber. I say that because in the time I have been in your Lordships' House I have seen that they have made extremely worthwhile contributions and they have brought a different perspective to your Lordships' debates that is not available from those of us who are not hereditary and who have come from other walks of life. We must address the question of postal voting. We need in this country a postal vote system that is totally foolproof. I suppose that many of us have taken part in various elections around the world, and we know that creative people in all political parties will try to rig elections. If, as it has been proved by the Electoral Commission and many other groups, you have to have a system of registration, I hope and pray that now that the election has been put to one side, the Government will address this particular issue. I am also concerned that while we have a Welsh Assembly, a Scottish Parliament and periodically a Northern Ireland Assembly, issues arise in the other place that are purely English in nature. I personally do not welcome the thought of an English Parliament, but if that groundswell is to be addressed, we must find a mechanism whereby purely English issues are handled just by English MPs. I shall make a further point: not one of us in this Chamber was able to vote in the general election, apart from elections to the county councils. That is a total anomaly. We spend our working hours and days here and we all have strong views. At the very least, we should be given by way of pay the opportunity to vote. Finally, when I was the Chairman of Ways and Means, I used to track what happened to statutory instruments because I was responsible for them in the other place. It is not so long ago—less than 10 years—when the average number of statutory instruments a year was just under 2,000. Today the figure is 3,400 per annum. I calculate that that is more than 60 statutory instruments a week. One of the areas in which the Government have announced that there will be progress—it was announced by the Chancellor—is in reducing regulation. A very fine area in which to make a start would be to have a target—the Government love targets—for the reduction of statutory instruments. I shall continue to monitor the numbers and if I am in a position to praise the Government on reducing them, I shall do so. But I have an awful fear that that 3,400 average will continue to creep upwards. Regulation is a burden that grows on all of us. Why do we not merge some of the regulation agencies as suggested by the Philip Hampton review? The review, commissioned by the Government, was very clear. Philip Hampton and his team suggested that the regulation agencies should be merged. Why do we not set a target—another target—for each department of state to reduce red tape by, say, 10 per cent per annum? A reduction of even 5 per cent per annum would be enormously helpful. Our party did a lot of genuine hard work on trying to reduce regulation. I should have thought that that report was well worth looking at to see whether it contains some good ideas. In my judgment, 45 Bills, even in an extended Session, is far too many. Perhaps some day we can agree, across the parties, how many major Bills there shall be in a Session and how many minor ones. Finally, on the regulators—I declare an interest as chairman of the Children's Mutual and one of the investment trusts—the FSA has a very important role to play, but it is very costly. I winced when I saw the auditing costs of the small life company that I chair. They are up by a third, simply to fill in the FSA's extra form requirements. Something seems to have gone wrong somewhere. We all know that we dare not change our banks for fear of having to do the money laundering exercise. It is a horrendous prospect for any consumer in this country even to contemplate changing their bank account. I should like to highlight one or two areas which touch on some of the Minister's responsibilities. We need to address climate change and energy shortage. Whether we like it or not, we have to address the issue of nuclear. My noble friend Lord Kimball spoke about wind farms. They will never provide the substantial amount of energy that we need. We need to have an open and full debate on the nuclear situation, we need to do it urgently and we need to take the whole country with us. On pensions, the destruction of the final salary scheme is a tragedy, and I think it is now recognised as such. But the concept of a variable retirement age that was floated last weekend should be hit on the head straight away. That is totally unacceptable to the nation, and whatever we do about pensions, we have to take the whole nation with us. We have to find an answer—not a party political answer—that all of us can accept and adopt. Pensions are far too important for all our people, and we must find a way through the political morass. Allied to that is the tragic level of savings ratio of under 5 per cent. The Government must find a way of bringing the level of savings up. There will be a Bill to deal with housing costs. I used to be the chairman of the housing committee in the London Borough of Islington, a very poor part of London in 1968 when I had that role. A number of schemes on shared equities were tried out; some were successful and some were less successful. But they were open-ended; the local authority was the driving force regarding whether we could take them forward. The prospect of having a rationed housing incentive scheme for equity sharing will not appeal to the British people. When they bring forward that Bill, the Government will need to recognise that you cannot ration with just 100,000 equity shared schemes and leave it to the building societies to decide how they will carry out the rationing. That is shoving the difficult decision on to somebody else. There has to be a rethink. We must take the British people with us on sustainable communities, and one of the key issues is waste. I had written a little about waste and then this afternoon I picked up an Environment Agency publication called Bye-bye waste? I assume that it was in my post; it has only been out for the past few days. It says that our recycling rates are the third lowest in the EU. So we are near the bottom. It also says: "There is one final problem with the way we talk about waste, and it's the biggest one of all. Put simply, waste doesn't have to be waste. Often it need not be there in the first place. And when it is there, we can often do something much more useful with it than try to get rid of it". That seems to be the challenge the Government should take up. If they were to do so in the manner suggested in this publication, I do not see that any of us would object to it. It could be a major step forward in improving our environment.