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Parliament: Legislative Proposals

asked Her Majesty’s Government what steps they are taking to improve the preparation of legislative proposals to Parliament. The noble Lord said: With the publication earlier this week of the Government's draft Constitution Renewal Bill, this is a well timed debate. I am very grateful to the Leader of the House and others of your Lordships here present, one magnificently accoutred, for being here to debate it. I begin by acknowledging what the Government have already done in the area covered by this Question. It was immensely encouraging that the first act of the new Prime Minister's administration last July was to publish the Governance of Britain White Paper, which included proposals to redress the balance between the Executive and Parliament. That theme was carried forward in the Statement from the Lord Chancellor this week, when he said: "““The accountability of Government is fundamental to the health of our democracy””.—[Official Report, Commons, 25/3/08; col. 21.]" Again, it is Parliament, the seat of our democracy, that is central to the programme of constitutional renewal. What gives the greatest hope is the Government's apparent recognition that enabling Parliament to play its proper role is good for governance, good for the people of this country and therefore ultimately good for the Government themselves. It may seem curmudgeonly to use the word ““apparent””, from which your Lordships will deduce my view that there is more that the Government could do to the end than they have stated. It would be naive to deny that there is a paradox in the relationship between the Government and Parliament. Because part of the role of Parliament is to scrutinise the Executive, there is bound to be an adversarial relationship, which is enhanced by the fact that Parliament is the platform for the opposition parties. In consequence, over nearly 200 years, the Executive have progressively sought to corral and dominate Parliament, with a good deal of success. Even so, I grew up professionally in a Civil Service tradition that honoured Parliament; not only honoured it but found it exciting. It was the cockpit in which our Ministers stood or fell. We shuddered at the thought of causing the Minister inadvertently to give inaccurate information to Parliament. We would not have dreamt of doing so advertently. The imbalancing of the relationship between the Executive and Parliament is reflected in how successive Governments have brought legislation before Parliament. Because the Executive can take it for granted that they can get their legislation through, they produce too much legislation and do not prepare or even argue for it properly. One gets the impression that some White Papers are produced with an eye more on soundbites for the media than critical analysis, although I am told by people more expert than me that the recent White Paper on nuclear energy was a distinguished exception to that. We can all produce examples of the Executive taking Parliament for granted. An example which particularly struck me was when I had occasion to look up the parliamentary proceedings on a section of the Finance Act 2005, which contained 106 clauses, 11 schedules, amounting to 202 pages of law in all, covering income and corporation tax, trusts, film relief, stamp duty and various anti-avoidance measures. But I could not find any discussion of the section in which I was interested, because in the lead-up to the general election 2005, the House of Commons passed all stages of the Bill in one day, four hours and two minutes, and your Lordships passed it in 24 minutes on the following day. A system which can pass complex and important legislation as cursorily as that, even as part of a desk-clearing exercise before an election, cannot be right. Nobody could say that such cursoriness was necessary, since, following the election, the Government introduced a further Finance Bill three months later, which covered much the same ground with a further 72 clauses and 11 schedules and added a further 159 pages to the statute book. No one would defend a proposition that legislation be introduced when it is not necessary or that policy proposals be ill-prepared. Why should anybody defend it? I am asking today that the Government commit to processes designed to avoid those outcomes by adopting standards against which they can be held to account and tested by Parliament. We all know that there have been approaching 70 Home Office Bills in the past 10 years. As the noble and learned Lord, Lord Howe of Aberavon, has said, if the people could be given a voice, the cry which would be most likely to go up would be: "““For God’s sake, leave us alone””." I have been working with an all-party group, the Better Government Initiative, preparing proposals in this area for Parliament and government to consider. The proposals are wide-ranging and interlinked, and can be found at the Better Government Initiative website, which is www.bettergovernmentinitiative.co.uk. The proposal to which I want to draw particular attention is the suggestion that the Government commit to accompanying their policy and legislative proposals with a public document that certifies that they have gone through the steps of: exploring why action is desirable and, in the case of legislation, operationally necessary; analysing the costs and benefits and defining the objectives in terms suitable for post-legislative scouting; setting out the reasons for the preferred action and showing its practicability; and carrying out consultation with those principally affected. I think that we would all agree that all those steps are good practice. In Germany, I understand, legislation requires the Government to satisfy these tests, but I do not propose that they should be added to the constitutional renewal Bill; for one thing, it would be yet more legislation. A parliamentary resolution would be sufficient to have an effect. It would be similar to that which the Government are proposing in order to commit the Executive to consult Parliament about decisions on going to war. Such a resolution would commit the Government to these unimpeachable principles for proposing legislation, and impose a parliamentary requirement that the Government declare that they had observed them. If that served to increase the quality of legislation, even at the cost of reducing some of the quantity, it would be no bad thing. Above all, such a move, like other proposals in the Governance of Britain White Paper, would be in the interests of good governance and the public, which is the point of government itself. I urge the Government to consider this move as part of their proposals for improving government, and I urge colleagues in both Houses of Parliament to press them to do so.