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Ministers and Civil Servants

That is all ancient history now. There certainly were from a monetary perspective, although there are many angles to the issue. Let us move on, because this is not a debate about those issues, which may interest the two of us but not everybody else. Listening to the Prime Minister's statement, in which he gave us an apparently bold set of initiatives on constitutional reform, I was immediately suspicious, not because the words seemed bad, but because of who was saying it. I had followed what he said about the economy and had seen the gap between what he appeared to announce and what he actually announced in many areas of tax and spending policy. The hon. Member for Cannock Chase did a tour of the TV and radio studios, describing those initiatives as ““Christmas””, but I am afraid it turned out to be Christmas in a board school, or somewhere where few presents were around, because when we finally got, through ““Governance of Britain””, the draft Constitutional Renewal Bill it was surprisingly thin on all these issues. I should say that, to me at any rate, it was unsurprisingly thin. There are a couple of acid tests by which the Bill can be judged. First, if it were in place, would Parliament be better able to scrutinise the activity of the Executive? For example, would we have been able to have in place better ex post scrutiny of Iraq, even if not ex ante, and would we have been able to have the full inquiry, which many hon. Members who opposed the war feel is necessary? I cannot see much in those proposals that would have improved the scrutiny of the Iraq war, even if they had been in force at the time of the war. We must give Parliament and its Committees independence—and its Select Committees enough power—to be able to make those ex post inquiries themselves; they do not have it at the moment. They must be able to call for papers and officials, as American committees do, and they should, of course, have Chairmen who are independent and seen to be independent as a consequence of election by secret ballot of the whole House. The hon. Member for Cannock Chase is an independent-minded Chairman, which is why his Committee has functioned better than many, but we should not have to rely on people who adopt that degree of independence of mind. The second acid test of the whole constitutional renewal package is whether the British public will trust and respect their system of government any more once the Bill is in force. After all, we are all agreed that there has been a decline in the level of trust. The Bill contains scarcely any measures that will do much on that score. There is a tiny bit here and there, including putting the Ponsonby rule on a statutory basis; the public will not know what that means, but at least wars will be slightly better scrutinised than they would have been. Among the things that I would like to see is an end to the Prime Minister's almost exclusive control over patronage, because that enables the Prime Minister to wield such huge power. I am pleased that the democracy task force on which I sat, chaired by my right hon. and learned Friend the Member for Rushcliffe (Mr. Clarke), came out in favour of a wholly independent committee for the appointment of peerages, knighthoods and other honours and for a complete divorce of the appointment of honours for people whose job is to serve in the legislature. An elected House of Lords, which I would prefer, would be a step forward. We should clean up party funding by putting a cap on all big donations by individual donors and trade unions, for example. That is controversial for all parties, but I think that it has to be done. Perhaps we should consider some measures for direct engagement with the electorate, such as giving some teeth to petitioning and giving some place in the timetabling of our legislative programme for petitions. If we had had any of the proposals that I have just mentioned, the trust issue would begin to be addressed a little. Has the report done much in that regard? I am afraid that I am not a strong supporter of it. There have been a lot of friendly words about it, but I did not find much in it that was exciting. Rather than go through it bit by bit, let me just illustrate why I feel that it is a little bit thin by mentioning a few things that need addressing and saying where I think it is off beam. One of the worries that the report seeks to address is a bit of a non-worry: that politicians may try to politicise the role of appointing civil servants. That is not the main problem. The main problem is not that the civil service needs to be kept pure through the appointments mechanism, but that it may be bypassed from the heart of decision making within the machinery of government. Certain clauses as drafted in either the first or second volume of the Constitutional Renewal Bill—I cannot remember which—suggest that the civil service should give impartial advice to Ministers, but it should also say that Ministers should give due weight to that advice. In other words, they should have to show that they have at least listened to that advice and that civil servants had an opportunity to say their piece in front of the Minister, rather than being channelled and funnelled through intermediaries, such as advisers. Hon. Members might say, ““What sort of remedy could there possibly be with such a clause?”” Freedom of information could help there and could establish whether the fact of advice, rather than its content, was ever received or looked at by a Minister. This Prime Minister, when he was Chancellor, had a habit of getting into a huddle with a trusty few—an inner core—often without the civil service being involved at all, when taking decisions in the Treasury. That has been a major source of disquiet, not only in the civil service but more widely in the financial and economic communities that have been affected by those decisions. It has been pernicious and, from what I can tell, he seems to have carried over the practice, to some degree, into No. 10. All of what I am describing is a much more important abuse than tampering with appointments. A related abuse is the emergence of what has been called by one Cabinet Secretary the development of a parallel state—meaning special advisers and envoys. We have to clamp down on that. Taking envoys first, patronage has been extended to the appointment of Back Benchers, who are given envoy titles and expenses. We have had an envoy on forestry and on—