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Cabinet Office: Constitution Committee Report

My Lords, first, I welcome the noble Lord, Lord Taylor of Holbeach, to his new position. As everyone has before responding to reports of this kind, he already has a whole list of questions, and I can absolutely guarantee that I will add to that burden. I am not sure that there is anything particularly new about the tensions that exist between Prime Ministers and Cabinets. Was it not the Duke of Wellington who said of his first Cabinet that, when he gave his instructions, it "argued back"? Those arguments are healthy and they certainly take place. I think that we can be grateful to the noble Lord, Lord Goodlad, and his committee for this excellent report. The timing is perhaps accidental because we would have wanted its publication to be the same but the result of the election to have been somewhat different, but it provides a detailed view on how the Cabinet Office and the centre of Government work; gives a clear insight into the operation of the Cabinet Office and the centre; and comes to a broad range of conclusions and makes a number of recommendations. While I agree with much of the report, there are certain areas where we do not enjoy the same degree of agreement. I suppose that one can instantly recognise the conclusions of the committee on the handling of the departure of the previous distinguished Lord Chancellor, my noble and learned friend Lord Irvine of Lairg. The official response on this side of the House on that issue is set out in the letter from my right honourable friend the Member for Dulwich and West Norwood. I see no point in going back to it because the significance of this report is its relevance to today and moving forward, a point made also by the noble Lord, Lord Goodlad. This report was prepared and a government response was made before the general election, and therefore it refers to a time before the formation of a new and relatively, for most of us, unique form of coalition government. It is not unique in history, but it is for the present time, and certainly in the context of the question of whether we have presidential, co-presidential or Cabinet government. We think that the report’s analysis and recommendations are equally important to the new coalition Government. We will seek to hold the new coalition Government to account against the recommendations made by your Lordships’ Committee, and indeed against the considerable weight of argument made by distinguished Members of the House in the debate today. Also, I yield to no one in my experience, which is tangential to government, in my admiration for senior British civil servants. We have had a mandarin cadre which has given us great service over many years and I see no diminution of that. With Cabinet Secretaries from the noble Lords, Lord Armstrong, Lord Butler and Lord Wilson, to Sir Gus O’Donnell, I can see that the quality is there. It is of course for the machinery of government and for Parliament to hold to account how we use the good talents that we have before us. The central points of the report as reflected in the concerns recorded and the recommendations made relate to the previous Government, but they must apply equally to the future. The central recommendation is that the structures of accountability should mirror more closely the structures of power. We have seen another adjustment because we now have the fairly unique relationship of a Prime Minister and a Deputy Prime Minister almost walking hand in hand—the Ant and Dec of politics. I see that they are to make another major announcement on Thursday. If you look up that announcement with the Lobby correspondents, you will see that they are going to make it together. I do not criticise that because it makes sense in a coalition, but it does present a new dynamic both in terms of how the Government operate and, indeed, the role of the Cabinet Office with an Office of the Deputy Prime Minister. We have two parties, not one, in the coalition Government, and we have a Prime Minister and Deputy Prime Minister acting jointly on many occasions. We agree with the committee’s conclusion that where the structures of power have changed—they unquestionably have—so should the structures of accountability. This leads me on to a number of questions, some of which have been raised by other noble Lords. The noble Lord, Lord Butler, asked whether the Minister could tell us what effect on accountability the changes in the structures of power and the conjoining of the Prime Minister and the Deputy Prime Minister will have, and where that will take us. Will, for example, the Government continue in this House with the innovation introduced by these Benches—when they were on that side and in government—of providing an opportunity to question members of the Cabinet who are also Members of your Lordships’ House? Specifically, will the Government now declare their commitment to provide an opportunity to question the one Member of your Lordships’ House, apart from the Leader of the House, who is a Cabinet Minister—the noble Baroness, Lady Warsi? Can the Minister make clear to the House the noble Baroness’s responsibilities in government? Can he specifically make clear what those responsibilities are in relation to government? She is, I am sure, an excellent chairman of the Conservative Party and will be a great asset in that function, but she is a member of the Cabinet and therefore it is reasonable to ask what role she has in government. Will the Minister undertake to bring forward proposals to give the House the ability to question and scrutinise the noble Baroness, Lady Warsi—if he can find out what she does? If she does not do anything, it begs the question, given the years of austerity before us, whether we can afford the luxury of Ministers who have no responsibility in government. The committee recommends that the Prime Minister’s Office should be subject to appropriate parliamentary accountability mechanisms. In the light of the formation of the coalition Government, can the Minister set out what mechanisms are now considered appropriate in that direction? Equally, the committee recommends that the Prime Minister’s role and the centre’s role in policy delivery should be transparent and accountable to Parliament—I am sure every Member of your Lordships’ House will agree with that—but, in the light of the committee’s recommendations, what do the Government propose to make the deliberations of the committee headed by the Deputy Prime Minister on further reforms of your Lordships’ House transparent and accountable? The coalition Government have, to their credit, named these two measures of transparency as being among the key objectives they hope to achieve. This is a good report which, by and large, we accepted when we were in government, with all its strictures and criticisms. I would like this Government to do likewise—not in terms of our operations in government but in terms of the coalition, which, of course, is a different animal. I endorse the remarks of the noble Lord, Lord Maclennan of Rogart. Clearly the Government need to consider these matters—I would not expect all the answers to be available when the Government have been in office for only a few weeks—but it would be useful to have either a further report from your Lordships’ Committee or a debate in this House when we have a greater understanding of where the Government are taking us and how far they will go in implementing the excellent recommendations in the report. We will probably find more differences than we would wish, but that is politics. The coalition Government should be and will be held to account. We on these Benches will do all we can. We commend the committee for its report and its attention to the question of good governance. We hope that it, too, will continue to keep a careful eye on the coalition Government and its intentions in relation to the Cabinet Office. I prefer "bran tub" to "dustbin", but I understand the point that has been made. Although I do not go back as far as when the Duke of Wellington was Prime Minister, reading the report reminds me that as long ago as 1971 I found myself making representations to the then Minister for the Civil Service about the decision to eliminate the Civil Service Department. Little did I think then that, going on for 40 years later, that Minister would now be the Minister for Foreign Affairs in your Lordships’ House, the noble Lord, Lord Howell of Guildford. However, time passes and, in government, some of the problems come back. Questions about the machinery of government have been around for all of my time in the Civil Service. I understand that we now have coming up questions about regional pay and the dispersal of civil servants to the regions. All these questions have been posed before; all have been answered. However, all the answers have not been correct. Let us hope that on this occasion the excellent report of your Lordships’ committee helps the Government to reach the right conclusions.