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Home Affairs and Justice

The hon. Gentleman is right to say that the Law Lords—and former Law Lords—make an extremely valuable contribution, but the Committee took a strong view on the matter, believing that either no justices of the Supreme Court should go to the second Chamber in retirement, or that all of them should. In other words, the Government should not be allowed to pick and choose from among Supreme Court judges as it might be thought that those judges were waiting to see whether they would get the rather attractive retirement option of being appointed to the second Chamber. My inclination is that no Supreme Court judges should be so appointed, and indeed that we should continue to employ them for as many years as we reasonably can. Sometimes we get a bit too precious about age restrictions in the judiciary. In earlier years, when we had 85-year-old judges, we may have gone to the other extreme, but we may have got a little too fussy about judges who may still be able to render active service. The Government seem to be groping for an alternative to confirmation hearings. They have looked at the idea of post-appointment hearings, but I think that they would be an unnecessary formality. My Committee takes evidence from judges when it is relevant to what we are doing, or when we sense that judges want to give evidence about a particular matter. I see no benefit in bringing a judge before the Committee for an evidence session just because he happens to have been appointed head of the Queen's bench division in the past two or three months. There is no logic in that, and it risks formalising what I believe is developing into a fruitful and effective process, by which judges at every level—from the Lord Chief Justice to lay magistrates—give evidence about every aspect of the work of the courts when it is most valuable and appropriate to do so. The Government should forget confirmation hearings and not try to construct some alternative to them. Such hearings may be appropriate for those people—the regulators, ombudsmen and so on—who might better be regarded as officers of the House, but they are probably a false trail for members of the judiciary. I turn now to some of the other issues arising from the Government's constitutional agenda. I am very pleased that, at long last, the Government have abandoned their crazy scheme to use fees as a proxy to restrict the freedom of information regime. That would have been seriously damaging, and would have prevented the complex of FOI requests that often enable us to get at the real truth of whether something is working or not. I warmly welcome the Government's decision on that, and their moves to consider other matters, such as the 30-year rule. That is excellent, although I and my Committee would like them to go further and make the Information Commissioner an Officer of the House, paid out of the parliamentary budget rather than the Department's budget. It is not a good idea for the poacher to determine the gamekeeper's budget. The Justice Department is often criticised for its handling of FOI issues, and I would much prefer the Information Commissioner to have the same independence as that enjoyed by the Comptroller and Auditor General or the Scottish Information Commissioner, the latter being appointed and funded by the Scottish Parliament. In passing, I want to mention ecclesiastical appointments, which fall within the Justice Department's responsibility. The Prime Minister, who comes from a good Scottish Presbyterian background, is anxious to divest himself of involvement with them. The Government said that they were going to abolish the post of Lord Chancellor, but they have had to take a step back—literally, in the case of the way that the latest Lord Chancellor stepped backwards from the throne yesterday. They forgot that the Lord Chancellor appoints about 1,000 people to various ecclesiastical posts. The Committee took evidence about the appointments system from its customers—the people in the parishes to which the Lord Chancellor makes appointments—and we have never come across a group of people more satisfied with the civil service. All the parish representatives were unanimous in their praise of the Downing street officials who manage the task. We were told that those officials were very careful in identifying a parish's needs and in following up to make sure that their judgments were correct and that the people appointed had appropriate support. We then spoke to three bishops to see what they thought. Each had a completely different view about what should be done with the patronage if it were taken away from the Lord Chancellor and was in some way handed over to the Church. So we were confronted with people who thought that the present system worked extremely well, and with three bishops who could not agree about what system should replace the current arrangements. To me, that does not seem like an environment in which a reforming Government can move very easily, and I therefore counsel them to be a bit careful. As a non-conformist, I can well understand the arguments of principle, but it was a fascinating evidence session. Before Ministers take the matter much further, I hope that they will sit down and read the evidence that was given on that occasion. I turn now to party funding. Mine is an all-party Committee, and we agreed unanimously on the principles involved in party funding and the outline proposals to deal with it. We were clear that there was great public concern about big money flowing into political parties, from whatever source. We believed that any new system should offer visibly cleaner politics, based on a voluntarily agreed and binding framework for a limit on donations that would put no one party at a disadvantage. Hayden Phillips took those principles and developed them a little further in the proposals that he put forward. The Constitutional Affairs Committee addressed the questions of large private donors, such as Lord Ashcroft, and trade union funding. It was not easy for Conservative or Labour members of the Committee to reach an agreement on those matters, but reach one we did. That involved each side recognising that no solution would be sufficient if it ignored the problem that was perceived to exist with the other party. No progress can be made on funding if the question of trade union contributions is not addressed. We accept the arguments about the individual element in those contributions, but we also recognise that trade unions are significant donors of block sums of money, both nationally and in individual constituencies, over and above individual affiliation. Moreover, it is clearly impossible to ignore the scale of donation to the Conservative party, something that the Liberal Democrats have experienced only to a much more limited—and occasionally controversial—extent. None of us can ignore the criticisms that others make of aspects of the system from which we benefit. That made consensus desirable, and my Committee also felt that greater taxpayer support should be conditional on removing big paymasters, of any kind, from the political system. Taxpayers will not want to yield up tax for that purpose if they do not get visibly cleaner politics as a result. Consensus is highly desirable. I am very disappointed that the all-party talks seem to have broken down at the moment, and I do not think that any party can have a veto on progress in this matter. However, whether the Government are able to make progress will depend on whether they can retain a broadly even-handed approach. The Government will have to get legislation through both Houses of Parliament, and they do not have a majority in the other place. Cross-Bench peers, as well as my colleagues, will be looking for evidence that the Government are bringing forward a settlement that is reasonably objective. If that settlement cannot be achieved by means of a formal agreement among the parties, the Government will go ahead and legislate. I would not criticise them for doing so, as no one should have a veto on this matter, but they would be successful only if the basis of the legislation were widely seen to be objective. I shall not go into too many more of the matters arising from the Government's constitutional agenda, as we shall have many more occasions to do so. I merely want to say that progress towards reform of the House of Lords must continue to be made, and that I look to the Government for some momentum in that regard, rather than deferment. I also remind the Government that they will have to return to the question of electoral reform, and that they have still not fulfilled their commitment to publish a document that they have been preparing for I do not know how long. I have no great hopes for the document, as I suspect that those who wrote it were looking over their shoulder the whole time. However, we cannot look at the British constitution from a basis of principle, as the Prime Minister wants to do, without asking the question: does the system ensure that the opinions of voters are fairly represented in Parliament in a way that enables government to be conducted in an orderly and consistent manner? Such questions must be addressed and that means looking at electoral systems. I conclude by considering a worrying omission—the absence of the coroners Bill from the Queen's Speech. The measure has been an issue for some time, especially since the two Shipman inquiries, which made clear how deficient the existing coroners and death registration systems were. In a report in 2006, the Constitutional Affairs Committee was extremely critical of the draft Bill for two major reasons. The first was that the Bill did not sort out the resources problem. It attempted to create a national structure while leaving coroners dependent on myriad systems of hand-to-mouth support—sometimes from police authorities, sometimes from local authorities and sometimes from their own solicitors practices—to run the coroners system. Secondly, the Bill did not tie together the coroners and death registration systems. We cannot deal with the problems identified by the Shipman inquiries without marrying together those two systems. When the Bill did not appear in the Queen's Speech last year I was reasonably content; indeed, in a small way, I felt it might have been a victory for the Committee that the Government were forced to reconsider the Bill and perhaps undertake a bit of a fight to sort out the resources issue, which involves talking to local authorities as they provide most of the resources for the existing system. I thought that the Government would be able to introduce an improved Bill as a result of that process, but it has not happened. I received a courteous letter from the Under-Secretary of State for Justice, the hon. Member for Lewisham, East (Bridget Prentice), which states:"““As you are no doubt aware, the Coroner Reform Bill was not included in today's Queen's Speech.””" It noted that the Government were still committed to reform, and went on:,"““we intend to bring the Bill before Parliament as soon as time allows””." One of my more charitable colleagues said, ““That means we're going to get the Bill, doesn't it?”” I said, ““Oh, no, no.”” I have been in the House 34 years and I have often seen that language used. It almost always means that the Bill is not coming at all—it is like the bus that is just around the corner.