Constitutional Reform and Governance Bill

My Lords, the Prime Minister recently indicated that he was personally in favour of a written constitution. I am bound to say that I think he is right. The arguments for that are greatly strengthened by the piecemeal approach to reform that we have observed over the past 13 years. I was very struck by what the right reverend Prelate said earlier about the mode of making these changes to our system. It is correct that they are not likely to deal with the problem of trust, on which the Minister laid great emphasis in his opening remarks, if they do not include at least a proper dialogue with the public. In the brief time that I propose to speak, I want to say that I very much regret that issues of constitutional reform have become so divisive between the political parties, between the Houses of Parliament and between Government and Back-Benchers. I refer particularly to the way that the Government have treated the Public Administration Select Committee chaired by Tony Wright, which has produced most thoughtful reports on how change might be made in a progressive fashion. I believe that if we are to have a constitution which is apt to deal with the extreme complexity of government, we have to recognise that it requires deliberation, dialogue and partisan considerations to be vented, certainly, but also to be put firmly in their place and made clear. It is true that for a long time my party has considered that we in this country cannot hope to improve the quality of government or to increase the delivery of what the public have voted for and expect to see without significant changes in the way that Governments do business. It seems to me that in this Bill the Government have rather lost sight of the purpose of constitutional reform. It is about improving the quality of government and making it more accountable and responsive to the people who make up our democracy. In a speech with which I sympathised at the beginning of this debate, the Minister, the noble Lord, Lord Bach, emphasised heavily the nature of the circumstances in which we are considering these matters: the loss of trust of the public. It has to be said that I doubt whether bringing forward such measures at this time will of itself contribute to a restoration of trust, and that must be very much regretted. It has obviously been a scramble. When I was appointed to the Joint Committee nearly three years ago to consider the Constitutional Renewal Bill, it never occurred to me that we would have to wait so long to consider in detail in Committees of both this House and another place the most central issues in that Bill relating to the Civil Service. It might have been wise if at that time the Government had recognised the degree of support that there was for that part of the Bill—now Part 1 of this omnibus Bill that we are considering—and had treated it as of sufficient importance, and having gained sufficient consensus, to merit enactment. There are matters before us in this Bill on the Civil Service which are not entirely satisfactory but which I think could easily have been taken out or corrected if there had been a proper opportunity to consider that part of the Bill with deliberation. The Constitution Committee of this House has drawn attention to the report and suggestions of the Public Administration Select Committee on, for example, the powers of the Civil Service Commission. It pointed to the desirability of the Civil Service Commission having a power to investigate matters affecting its role at its discretion. That does not appear in the Bill, and it clearly should. The Bill provides for the appointment of Civil Service Commissioners on merit, but it does not say anything about promotion, and that is clearly an integral question. It ought to have been spelled out in statute when we are seeking to put the Civil Service on a statutory basis. Another example to which the committee drew attention was the Public Administration Select Committee’s proposal that senior appointments from outside the Diplomatic Service should be limited in number to three. That would certainly differentiate us from our friends in the United States. It got great backing and considerable understanding. These are matters that I do not regard as make-or-break in the Civil Service part of the Bill, but they are important and they should have been considered in the regular way. We have to recognise the disadvantages of doing constitutional reform in such a hurry. I heard the intervention from the former Speaker of another place. She asked whether a constitutional Bill has been handled in this way in the wash-up. I think there ought to be a good deal of the Bill in the wash-up because the Civil Service part of it makes a great deal of sense and there are parts that deal with the crises of the moment that ought to be recognised and enacted. They could be called tidying up operations. For some time, my noble friend Lord Steel has put forward arguments about how this House ought to operate prior to the wholesale composition reform that merit being enacted. However, I do not think it greatly enhances trust to bring forward at this stage a proposal to have a referendum on the alternative vote. I am in favour of having a referendum, but I do not think this is the right time or the right way to do it. The right time would have been in the early years of this Labour Government, when there was a firm proposal in the manifestos of my party and the Labour Party to have a referendum on an alternative system of voting, which was to be worked on by the committee chaired by the late Lord Jenkins. That report was for a variation on the alternative vote, which would have made it more proportional. A huge opportunity was lost when that recommendation was not put to the people at least 10 years ago. We are bound to say that Governments in this country tend to reform the constitution in a piecemeal fashion, but the pace of reform has increased under this Government, and I want to pay tribute to them for that. However, we now require serious deliberation on how to express the principles that should underlie our modern democracy and how to deal with the out-of-date prerogative powers not by tinkering with resolutions on the war powers alone but by looking at whether it is satisfactory that the Executive’s decisions should be dressed up in this 18th century constitutional garb which is simply unsuitable. I appeal to the Government through the Minister to recognise that we will have to look at these issues—not just the issues in the Bill but the issues that we all recognise need to be addressed—in a more coherent, deliberative way and involve the public and all parties in the discussion in the full expectation that the principles that the Prime Minister backed when he published his Green Paper in July 2007 are translated into legislation that delivers what he proposed we need.