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Draft Legislative Programme

We welcome the opportunity to discuss the programme for the coming year. As my right hon. and learned Friend the Member for North-East Fife (Sir Menzies Campbell) said on 11 July when the Prime Minister made his statement, it is right that we should move from legislation being cooked up in secret and announced on one day with a fanfare of trumpets—albeit that it had usually been leaked beforehand, with everyone pretending one thing was happening when it was not—to a system of honest and open discussion in which the Government say at the outset, ““This is what we are thinking,”” and at the end saying, ““This is our final view.”” That is a much better process. We welcome it, and will co-operate on it. We also welcome the honesty of the Leader of the House. This parliamentary year will operate from the arrival of the new Prime Minister at the end of June, so time is inevitably foreshortened. We understand and accept that. However, I made the point in an intervention that that should not mean that consultations should not be considered, and it will not be helpful if ideas are not taken on board. Flexibility will be required, as will hard work in October by civil servants and others employed in Departments, and Ministers must be honest about any good ideas that are made. We look forward to that. My position and that of my fellow Liberal Democrat Members can be summarised by saying—[Interruption.] Although none of them is present, as I have been their colleague for so many weeks, months and years, they trust me to speak for them. Our position is that Governments have often legislated in haste and introduced measures that we subsequently regret. Legislation, legislation, legislation is no substitute for good administration, but it has often been used as a substitute for it. I checked up on three Departments. In the past 10 years, we have had 11 Health Bills, four Health White Papers and seven Health Green Papers. We have had 11 Education Bills, nine Education White Papers and 11 Green Papers. We have also had 60 Home Office Bills. Much of that proposed legislation has not been thought through; much of it has been undone, as the Government have returned and said, ““We want to change it””; and much of it has never been implemented—we pass it, but it never takes effect. My strongest plea to the Leader of the House and her colleagues is, please do not introduce any Bill that we do not absolutely need. Legislation should be the last resort, not the first resort. Usually, what is needed is administration—not new laws, but other steps. As the Leader of the House knows, one of the results of all the laws we have passed is that there are more than 3,000 new offences. That is not a healthy route to go down. The test I always apply is whether legislation increases liberty or authority. We have experienced 10 years in which the trend has been towards authority—by and large, although not without exception—and away from liberty. We need the trend to be in the other direction. My second test is whether legislation increases individual people’s power and local power, rather than central power. There have been some very centralising proposals. The national health service is still one of the most centralised services in the world, and real devolution to local people and communities is desperately needed. One of the measures by which we will judge any legislative proposal is whether it gives local government a real opportunity to be influential and powerful—as opposed to it being said that that will happen but it not being the case. The same test applies to the devolved Administrations. The Government need to understand that in devolving government to Scotland, Wales and Northern Ireland, they must actually devolve it. There are bits that they still hang on to, and so far they have not been willing to go down the road of a federal United Kingdom in which its four countries can have real autonomy in many of their own affairs.