Constitutional Reform and Governance Bill

I am aware that the Minister of State, Ministry of Justice, the right hon. Member for North Swindon (Mr. Wills) is approaching the end of his time in Parliament. I know that the Bill is of great importance to him, and I recognise that in piloting it through the House, he wanted to achieve as much consensus as possible. Let me say at once that the Conservatives have no difficulty in welcoming many aspects of the Bill. Indeed, we have expressed our support for those aspects from the outset. They include the move to put the civil service on a statutory footing, the proposal to beef up the Comptroller and Auditor General's national audit role and the work on judicial appointments, all of which, as the Minister will recall, we supported in earlier debates on the Bill. We also welcome the small but nevertheless important tidying-up of matters relating to, for instance, human rights claims against devolved Administrations, ratification of treaties, Crown employment and nationality. Although I must tell the Secretary of State and the Minister that the Bill does not quite live up to its grandiloquent title—certainly the "governance" bit—we can happily welcome its sensible constitutional reforms, and we therefore will not seek to divide the House tonight. That said, there are some aspects of the Bill that we find much more troublesome. I think it only right for me to mention them, because given the timetable facing the remaining life of this Parliament, sensible decisions will almost certainly have to be made at some point about whether the Bill can be enacted with the consensus that will be needed at the end of the Parliament's life or whether it should fail. As the Bill contains an adequate number of provisions that I want to see on the statute book, I hope that the Government will listen carefully to what I have to say about the parts of it that continue to cause us concern. First, however, let me say something about new clause 37. I am grateful to the Government for taking account of the concern expressed by Members in all parts of the House about what appeared to be the creeping in of a substantial change in the way in which counts take place after elections. I am delighted that we were able to table the new clause, and even more delighted that the Government were able to adopt it in a way that would otherwise not have been possible. I have no doubt that one or two noises made about it by some returning officers are without merit or substance. Ultimately, it is for the House of Commons to decide how counts should take place, and not for bureaucrats to start deciding that they are a law unto themselves. We are fully entitled to lay down the ground rules for ourselves, especially if they are—as they appear to me to be—entirely reasonable. The Government have also done a great deal in introducing clauses relating to IPSA, which my right hon. Friend the Member for North-West Hampshire (Sir George Young) has already commented on. There have been some sensible debates. We entirely endorse the need for reform, and we are pleased that the opportunity has been taken of trying to resolve the matter as far as possible before the general election. We hope very much that the proposals will work and lead to far greater public confidence in the way in which the House works. I have to turn to those bits that please us rather less. We think that the Government's proposals for a referendum on the alternative vote were brought in in great haste and in the most extraordinary fashion at the end of a long process—the Government have previously shown themselves to be rather hostile to such proposals. We think that a referendum would be a complete waste of money and undermine the first-past-the-post system, in which we believe and in which I think many Labour Members also believe. It strikes us that that measure is unnecessary, and we certainly would not wish to see it placed on the statute book. It has been a matter of considerable regret during the passage of the Bill that it has not been possible to debate Opposition amendments that required debate and certainly should have been debated, such as our new clause this evening about evening out the size of constituencies and reducing the size of the House. At the risk of repeating what I have said frequently, I do not think that at any stage during the passage of the Bill and debate on the Floor of the House there has been time wasting. Indeed, I think that the Minister will acknowledge that this evening, in an effort to make progress, at times we have curtailed debate to make very short contributions. Yet we face the fact that, at Report stage of a constitutional measure of considerable importance, a huge number of amendments have not been debated at all. I deeply regret that we have not had a chance to debate our proposals, which would have reinforced the first-past-the-post system, made it fairer and produced fairer results. In so far as our proposal has any pain involved in it, I say to the Secretary of State that, far from, as has been suggested, it being a piece of gerrymandering, the pain would fall fairly evenly. I cannot for the life of me see where the gerrymandering would be, because ultimately the decisions as to the shape of constituencies would lie entirely with the Boundary Commission, not with us as politicians. Our inability to debate that in this place during the passage of the Bill strikes me as an enormous missed opportunity. The title of the Bill does not reflect its true scope, and we have not had an opportunity to conduct a debate on that matter. I turn to other areas of the Bill. There are some sensible amendments in respect of the House of Lords, which we also welcome, and we await with interest how the other place responds to them. Some of the amendments are extremely good. We are delighted that our proposals about the tax status of Members of the House of Lords, put forward by my right hon. Friend the Leader of the Opposition and tabled by us, enabled us to bring about a change—[Interruption.] I see the hon. Member for Pendle (Mr. Prentice) smiling, but the fact of the matter is that, until we tabled that amendment, there was nothing in the amendment paper to bring that about. It was only our intervention, and our saying that that was clearly an area of public concern that needed to be addressed, which finally enabled us to do that. I am delighted that it has happened. Times change, and what may have been deemed to be acceptable in previous generations, when Commonwealth citizens, or Commonwealth residents, were encouraged to come and spend parts of their careers in this country and then go back to their homes, is no longer seen as acceptable, because of the public perception that people may derive tax advantages from it. That is all the more reason, therefore, to change those rules, but until we tabled that amendment, we were not in a position to do anything about it. I acknowledge that the hon. Member for Pendle had this in his sights for a considerable period, but he did not seem to be very successful in persuading his own Front Benchers to take the issue particularly seriously.