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Constitutional Reform and Governance Bill

I thank the Minister for that intervention, and especially for his initial comments, which amount to considerable progress on an important issue. Let me make one final remark on the House of Lords. I would not want an opportunity for real progress to be thrown away because the Secretary of State is inherently conservative and the Conservative party is hesitant and wants to impose a first-past-the-post electoral system on any future elected House of Lords. That would be a disaster given that we could be making real progress. There is an enormous amount to do in terms of the centralisation of power, but for now will the Government not at least commit to some small concessions? One thing they could do is implement the original intention of the Sustainable Communities Act 2007, which was that local government would be able to require central Government to declare what central Government spend in a local area so that negotiations can then take place on what should be done with that money. I gather that what is currently happening is that central Government interpret that Act as meaning only that central Government tell local government what local government are already spending, which of course completely undermines the whole process. Cannot the Government simply reverse their control-freak stance—which they revealed yet again last week—on the internal governance of local authorities which forces them to choose between a limited range of unsuitable Whitehall-based Government structures? The draft Bill included extensive provisions on removing the power of the Attorney-General to control decisions about particular cases—about whether a particular person should be prosecuted or not. In my view, it made unacceptable exceptions to that idea by talking about a national security exemption, but even this limited concession has now disappeared entirely from the Bill before the House tonight. The Secretary of State has not really explained what has happened. The current situation is entirely unacceptable, and I notice that the Parliamentary Assembly of the Council of Europe is now of a similar view. It is unacceptable for a Government Minister—a politician—to have the power to undermine the prosecution of, or even to decide to prosecute, individuals in particular cases. We all know about the controversy regarding the BAE Systems case and so on, but I do not want to discuss individual cases; I just want to talk about the principle of whether a Minister should have that sort of power. The hon. Member for Cannock Chase mentioned the separation of powers, and this seems to me the most obvious instance where the principle of the separation of powers is being violated. Such decisions should be exclusively for professional prosecutors.