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Queen’s Speech

My Lords, I am very happy to share something with the noble Earl, Lord Ferrers; namely, a wheelie bin in Warwick Square. I hope that he does not feel the necessity to consign my remarks to it, but I promise him I will not supervise what he puts in it. I thoroughly agree with the noble Earl’s view about the discontents of our country not beginning with the much published actions of the Members of another place recently. It is quite clear that for more than a decade this country has been conscious of the anachronistic elements of our constitution, the fact that successive governments have not delivered what they have aspired to and that the system is, at least in part, due to that. At this time in a Parliament it is unreal to expect all the identified defects to be tackled in a monster constitutional Bill. This debate has gone in two directions. There have speakers who, like the noble Lord, Lord Rooker, have made extremely practical suggestions. He made seven proposals, to which most of this House would give assent, about how we can reform ourselves effectively without an Act of Parliament. Other speakers have had a wider view, and I fall into the latter category for the purposes of this debate. Consequently, I shall not expect the noble Lord, Lord West, to philosophise about what I say. I recognise that the undertaking in the gracious Speech that legislation will continue to be taken forward on constitutional reform is not to be dispensed with lightly, despite the considerable limitations of the Bill that flows from the earlier Constitutional Renewal Bill which, like the noble Lord, Lord Morgan, and a number of other speakers in this debate, I considered in the Joint Committee of the two Houses. That Bill was not adequate in the view of the Joint Committee. There was a certain discontent among many members about the proposals for the Attorney-General, so I am not entirely surprised that the Government have dropped their proposals on that subject. Similarly, there was quite a degree of dissatisfaction with the proposals for war powers and the fact that the Prime Minister’s prerogative to take this country into foreign hostilities was not frontally dealt with. Remnants of that Bill are in the Constitutional Reform and Governance Bill, which in at least one case seem to be most worthy of our attention. Part 1 of the Bill deals with the Civil Service. One hundred and fifty years after the Northcote-Trevelyan report, we will put the Civil Service on to a statutory basis. This House should congratulate itself on that, notwithstanding the time that it has taken to do so. This is particularly timely in view of what the Conservative spokesman on the Cabinet Office, Mr Francis Maude, has been saying about Conservative proposals for the Civil Service. He is reported by the Times, in a colourful article, to have indicated Conservative, ""Plans to let ministers chair departmental boards and appoint ‘chums’ from the private sector to get rid of permanent secretaries"." In the light of that, we need to do something to secure the independence of the Civil Service. We shall watch the progress of that Bill with great interest. If the rest of it is jettisoned, the country will not be much the worse off. The mountain of constitutional reform to be climbed is formidable if the Government are to meet the aspirations of the British people for the delivery of their objectives. Climbers sometimes take comfort and encouragement from looking down the hill at what they have surmounted, and there have been significant constitutional advances since this Government were elected in 1997. The enactment of the Freedom of Information Act has greatly improved the transparency of Executive action, and the Human Rights Act has given individuals a much speedier route to redress than they enjoyed when they had to take their case before the European Court of Human Rights. Scotland, Wales, London and Northern Ireland have all benefited from some decentralisation of power. We wait with interest to hear whether the Calman and Jones Parry reports will be acted on. The central weakness of the British constitutional arrangements, which none of these things really addresses, is the growth in the power of the Prime Minister. I do not expect the Minister to address that in his winding-up speech. None the less, it is important, because Cabinet government has clearly been replaced by overloaded responsibility at the centre. You cannot expect anyone to deliver on such a broad front when fingers are in every pie. The comparison between this Labour Government and the Labour Government of 1945 is not so much that there were giants in the 1945-51 Government and there are pygmies now but that the media have treated successive Prime Ministers as celebrities who, as a result, feel they must have the last, and indeed the first, word on everything. Candidly, that operates to the disadvantage of our sense of a people’s democracy. We are moving inexorably towards an American presidential system but without its proper checks and balances, and I hope that there will be time in what is left of this Parliament to look at how we can fortify those checks and balances.