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Queen’s Speech

My Lords, it is a pleasure to speak in such a wide-ranging debate—I shall not attempt to summarise it—which included two notable "maidens" who will clearly contribute much to the work of the House. I start by thanking two people. First, my predecessor, my noble friend, and friend, Lady Miller of Chilthorne Domer, who I know I will not be able to match. I do not wish to suggest that she has had her final word; she will simply be speaking from a little further back for the time being. Secondly, I thank Tim Oliver, who has given me outstanding help in his time in the Liberal Democrat Whips’ Office. I understand that at his interview for a teaching post at Sandhurst, when asked about coping with a class of soldiers weary and apt to fall asleep, he needed only to say that he works in the House of Lords. I thank him for his effective and patient assistance. Those on these Benches and those in the House with whom he has dealt on our behalf will miss him. I do not yet know how much of a culture shock it will be for me moving from the CLG brief. I thank the noble Lord, Lord Strathclyde, for this trailer. On Wednesday, he said: ""Not all occasions are as splendid or inviting as the State Opening of Parliament—just try day four in Grand Committee on the local democracy Bill with the Liberal Democrats at the crease"." I accept that my noble friend Lord Greaves and I do not do pageantry—but we do do scrutiny. We are bowlers rather than batsmen perhaps. The role of this House is largely holding the Government to account and scrutinising their decisions and actions, among which is legislation. So—no apologies for doing the job thoroughly. The noble Lord, Lord Rooker, always urges pilots, and I welcome his ideas to increase our effectiveness. The noble Lord, Lord MacGregor, made the right points about the House of Commons. The noble Lord, Lord Strathclyde, also spoke of the readiness of Peers, ""often to make sacrifices to attend".—[Official Report, 18/11/09; col. 11.]" As this debate covers constitutional affairs, I will comment that it may be that the Executive, the Government, are about to make that task much harder for many Members of this House. I refer of course to the rumoured proposals for reduced financial support for those colleagues whose homes are not in London and who may find it hard, perhaps too hard, to come here to contribute to the public service which the noble Baroness, Lady Symons, described in moving the Humble Address. I am not suggesting profligacy or impropriety, but it seems that the demands of the Executive, specifically No. 10, will affect our ability to hold the Executive to account. That is a constitutional matter. I know that I shall find similarities with the local government brief which I have held. I recently put into chronological order the statutes resulting from Bills on which I have worked over the years—it turned out also to be size order. The "torrent", as the noble and learned Lord, Lord Woolf, put it, of Home Office Bills, too, seems to get bigger by the year. The Government also legislate repetitively for aspirations, on matters of culture or, frankly, just to state the bleedin’ obvious. Perhaps there is one benefit in there being so little likelihood of much of the Government’s programme making it on to the statute book. New laws seem so rarely to be allowed to settle and be assessed before they are tinkered with. I have not spent long looking at the Crime and Security Bill, but I cannot help noticing that it seeks—I use the term deliberately; the Government can expect trouble on this—to amend the Policing and Crime Act, passed a matter of just a few days ago. It must be very dispiriting for officials to have to draft legislation which has no future or is clearly nonsense. What is the penalty for failing to halve the budget deficit or to provide good government? Our prisons are already under great strain—our noble friends Lord Dholakia and Lady Linklater referred to it—so is it to be tagging and curfew or the naughty step? I wonder whether this sort of abuse of officials is something that the proposed Civil Service Commission will consider. The target culture is also familiar, and not just through my CLG brief. It is likely that it was the need to add to the numbers for white, middle-aged women drivers that led to my being stopped and searched under Section 44 of the Terrorism Act a while ago. My respectability might just have been confirmed by the police finding in my boot a report from the Committee on Standards in Public Life. Travelling is hazardous for your Lordships. I, too, have had eventful taxi journeys, but now that I do not have to travel between Ken Livingstone’s City Hall and Parliament, they are a little quieter. Peers can look after themselves, but I share the concern of the Children’s Rights Alliance that reduced reporting requirements may weaken safeguards for children—sometimes very young children—who are subject to stop and search. In London, there was an 80 per cent increase over the year to March in the number of 10 year-olds stopped and searched. We must be alert, too, to the dangers of stopping and searching disproportionate numbers of members of ethnic minorities, as my noble friend Lady Harris said. Again in London, children from ethnic minority groups were proportionately overrepresented. Releasing the police from overly bureaucratic systems is important, but it needs care. Targets mean ring-fenced money and lots of report-writing. These Benches support local discretion and the work now going on to look holistically at all public spending in a geographical area to ensure the most bangs per buck. The Local Government Association has just published a report reminding us that every new initiative from central government has a cost in terms of the burden it places on local government. The announcement from CLG on funding to tackle anti-social behaviour will mean that the authorities granted extra funding will receive only between £40,000 and £70,000, to be spent by the end of the year. The benefit, even if projects can be found to spend it on at short notice, will be reduced by all the paperwork. If local authorities and their partners, including the police, had greater local control over priorities, and therefore over spending, costs would be reduced and more money would be available to be spent on making neighbourhoods safer. The ultimate accountability—the assurance test—would be provided by the voters. I say that but, of course, there is a major flaw in that argument for local accountability, the same as at parliamentary level. This year, voters in Kent saw Conservatives elected in 74 out of 84 seats on 47 per cent of the vote. In Essex, the Conservatives won 80 per cent of the seats with 43 per cent of the vote. In Leicestershire, a BNP councillor was elected, despite more than 72 per cent of the votes being cast against him. I could go on. I was myself once part of an administration with 92 per cent of the seats on 49 per cent of the vote; I did not think that it was right then, either. How can anyone continue to defend the first-past-the-post system? When we call for fair votes, we mean fair to the voters. One financial pressure will be on neighbourhood policing. Local authorities generally welcome being able to add to the number of PCSOs out of local authority funding, augmenting central government funding. Given the budget problems that both councils and police face, the LGA advises me that unless there is certainty in the longer term over the funding of PCSOs, there is a real threat to the ability to sustain neighbourhood policing into the future. Both police and local authorities have a major role in preventing crime. That needs more than lip service. I have been impressed, to take one example, by the work of Groundwork and of commercial organisations in conjunction with local authorities in building play and sports areas, which can really contribute to reducing anti-social behaviour. Schemes designed from the bottom up are clearly best. I am considerably less enthusiastic about the Crime and Security Bill's provisions about anti-social behaviour and parenting orders. The Government have such a tendency to criminalise. There is parenting support, yes, but not left until crisis point. My first question is what evidence the Government have on which to base the provision. For instance, to take a similar existing provision, what is the effect of the possibility of imprisonment of the parent of a truanting child? Is the breach rate for ASBOs accelerating children into custody? An ASBO is a civil matter; breaching it is criminal. There is a tendency to criminalise and to blur the lines between the civil and the criminal. I mentioned changes being made to the Policing and Crime Act, before the ink is dry, regarding the criminalisation of more young people and the imprisonment of more young people. We do not buy the Government's implicit argument that legislation is the answer to every problem. On domestic violence, while we welcome any measures to protect women—usually it is women—let us not lose sight of the underlying issue. How does such violence come to be? We must also consider those women who bring themselves to complain, to let anyone know what is happening in their own homes. For many years I was a member of the board of Refuge, the domestic violence charity. The noble Baronesses, Lady Kennedy and Lady Neville-Jones, also have associations with it. I do not think I ever attended an event where its work was explained without being aware of at least one woman in a corner of the room whose expression and body language indicated her personal experience of abuse. As well as a tendency to criminalise, the Government have a tendency to treat every citizen as a suspect. That is why we cannot support their approach to DNA. There are over 1 million people on the database who have no record on the Police National Computer— 44 per cent of the male black population and 6 per cent of the white population. We are with the right reverend Prelate the Bishop of Leicester—although I was distressed about his reference to Manchester United—in saying that the Government have not found the right balance between dealing with crime and individual liberty. One reason I was keen to take on the home affairs brief was because I am very conscious that it is not so very long since my family arrived in this country—as immigrants, not refugees. There is, indeed, a difference. I share that, I am sure, with many of your Lordships. Comparatively few of us, in or outside the House, are Ancient Britons. It must take enormous guts to move to a new country and a new culture, and it must be one of the jobs of politicians—a leadership role—to talk up the benefits of immigration, to say loud and clear that an ethnically mixed society that works makes for the greatness in Great Britain. Sadly, politicians are not currently regarded as role models, but that should not stop us continually making the point as well as seeking to address the fears of immigration through addressing the services that too often "they" are said to be taking from "us". Housing is an obvious example. Making it more difficult for immigrants to access language teaching does nothing for cohesion, and making immigration more difficult—or "tough", I suppose, in the jargon—may lead to businesses relocating to more immigration-friendly countries. That comes from a CBI survey. The moral high ground must be linked to the practicalities and the debate should be based on facts, which often seem to be in short supply in the competition for the most alarming headlines. An Immigration Simplification Bill is not the same as a badly needed consolidation Bill, and simplifying does not mean that the provisions are automatically right. At this stage in the debate, more Brownie points are likely to be gained by sitting down than by going on, and I knew that the 12 Liberal Democrats who preceded me—notably in greater numbers than on the other party Benches—would cover a huge amount of ground, as have all your Lordships. I look forward to continuing to contribute to the work of your Lordships’ House in home affairs because, and I wish I had coined this phrase, for all Liberal Democrats, civil liberties are in our DNA.