Welfare Reform Bill

My Lords, this is an unexpected, generic intervention. Although the Committee seems to be making real progress, I reassure my noble friend the Whip that I shall be brief. It relates to a period even earlier than 1986 and to a different and extreme subject, but there is a moral to what I am going to say, to which I gather Her Majesty’s Government in the Commons is responsive. Twenty-eight years ago I became the Parliamentary Under-Secretary for Higher Education. I inherited quite considerable cuts to the higher education budget and I decided that my time as Parliamentary Under-Secretary was going to be spent going round the country, available to any higher education institution that chose to invite me, and I would be St Sebastian responding to their observations about the cuts. I had two and a half years of pure joy because they made it extremely attractive to me to come and gave me a marvellous experience of seeing what they were up to. The experience of St Sebastian was cheap at the price. I refer in particular to Liverpool Polytechnic, which had a distinguished record in terms of architecture. I can see the look on the face of my noble friend the Minister, who is wondering where I am going, but I shall continue to go there. The Department of Education and Science had provided significant sums to Liverpool Polytechnic in order to enhance the admirable things it was doing, but Mr Hatton and his colleagues took the entire sum that we had provided for Liverpool Polytechnic and put it into the housing funds account. A year later I visited Liverpool Polytechnic again, but Mr Hatton's colleagues were unwilling to have lunch with me, although they were extremely keen that I should meet them, which I agreed to do. Outside the premises of our rendezvous, a man was distributing the Socialist Workers Party newspaper, and, as he did not seem to be doing brisk trade, I accepted a copy from him. I went into the meeting with it under my arm, in a spirit of benevolence, similar to that of Rab Butler during the passage of the 1944 Education Bill when he was visited by the Archbishop of Canterbury and other bishops, whom he disarmed by saying, as they came into the room, ““I wonder, Archbishop, if before we get down to business you would lead us in prayer””. The exposition by Councillor Hatton's colleagues to me was absolutely barefaced. They said that they had been extremely grateful to my department, which had nothing to do with housing, for the money that we had provided the previous year to Liverpool Polytechnic and which they had transferred to the housing account. The purpose of the meeting was to ensure that, if possible, I would do the same thing again. I had to explain to them that they had made it rather less attractive for us to provide money to Liverpool Polytechnic than it had been in the past. Ring-fencing can create problems. We wanted to help Liverpool Polytechnic but we were effectively denied the means to do so. Of course, hard cases always make bad law, but I have never forgotten that episode and I thought of it immediately when the noble Baroness, Lady Lister, moved her amendment.