Scotland Bill

My Lords, in opening my contribution to this debate, I am tempted to repeat what other Members have said and express my frustration and disappointment that, once again in dealing with this Bill, we have been deprived of a substantial amount of the time that was planned for debating it. In the interest of time, however, I do not intend to go into that in too much detail, other than to say that the frustration that all noble Lords feel about this, and have repeated almost every day of the Bill's deliberations, is exacerbated by the fact that it now appears that it was all unnecessary because we have managed to add a week to the Recess. We understood that this was because time was limited and we would lose the Bill if we did not do certain things before certain dates. Managing that against the challenge of trying to find time for the Government to make their position clear about the way forward on a referendum for Scotland, and allowing that to feed into our deliberations, caused me to go along with some of that inconvenience. Now we discover that it was all unnecessary because we can add a week to our Recess. Much of this could have been done on the other side of the Recess. I say that with deep regret. I excuse, once again, the noble and learned Lord from any responsibility for this because I suspect that it came as much of a surprise to him as it did to the rest of us that we could have an extra week's Recess and that this week was not precious and necessary for the conclusion of the Government's business. The reason for that is that the decision about the Recess dates is entirely within the gift of the Government and was not, and cannot be, discussed in the usual channels. I deeply regret that we are in this position because it appears it was all unnecessary. I turn to the amendments tabled by the noble Lord, Lord Forsyth. We had the advantage of debating at length a similar amendment on the second day in Committee. I intend, by reference to that debate, to shorten my remarks. I support devolution. I even support the asymmetric devolution we have in the United Kingdom; I am not a federalist in that sense. Devolution is an incomplete process and it is for the people of the regions of England to decide when they are ready for it. There is quite significant devolution across these islands, including substantial devolution to those who run this great city of London. Of course, one of the consequences of devolution is that there will be different policies and different consequences as a result of those policies across the United Kingdom. If that makes people feel uncomfortable, they should not support devolution. However, those of us who support it are prepared to live with that. When we debated this last time we established that, with the possible exception of rights of audience for the legal profession, there is only one example of the practice of discrimination as a consequence of separate policies, and that is the issue which is concentrating our minds today. The practice of discrimination appears to apply only to the funding of higher education student fees. It is for that reason that this is such a significant issue and why it has attracted the interest of the House. The need for a resolution to it appears to have captured the imagination of noble Lords. In Committee we had the benefit of a contribution by the noble Lord, Lord Sutherland, which he has augmented today. Also, the Minister set out in detail the history of how differential fees came about and how long they have been in existence. The noble Lord, Lord Stephen, went into more detail than he did on the previous occasion about the thought processes that informed the minds of those who were at the heart of the Labour and Liberal Democrat Scottish Executive that introduced the concept of differential fees and subsequently increased the cap on them. I listened carefully to the noble Lord and, because I have another source of confirmation, I absolutely do not doubt that legal advice informed that decision. However, in the end, whatever the legal advice was about the interaction between European law, domestic UK law and the plans and priorities of the Scottish Government, they were political decisions. These priorities are political decisions. The Scottish Executive then and the Scottish Government now could readjust their spending and say that this is a priority. For example, they could be persuaded by the arguments put forward by my noble friend Lord McFall and say, ““In the interests of Scotland in the United Kingdom, we should invest more in the higher education of our young people. If we are to compete in the world, we need to compete with the kind of education that young people around the world are getting in the areas of engineering, science or whatever””. These are political policy decisions and we need to take responsibility for them. As I say, in Committee we had the benefit of the history of this policy. We know that differential fees have existed since 2001, that they were revised in 2006 and again by the current Scottish Government in 2011. Those of us who received the briefing note from Universities Scotland will have read its take on this history. It sets out why there was a significant change at the point when the rest of the UK decided to substantially increase student fees and the effect that that had on the thinking of the Scottish Government and the universities. What interests me on listening to the noble Lord, Lord Sutherland, in particular, and reading the briefing note, is that no one really wants to take positive ownership of the consequences that young people across the United Kingdom live with if they are from England, Wales or Northern Ireland and want to be educated in Scotland at the higher education level. Nobody seems to be happy with them. Paragraph 3 on page 2 of the Universities Scotland briefing paper states that it should also make clear that the Scottish Government Cabinet Secretary for Education has made plain that this is not his preferred way forward but, in line with universities—it speaks for universities but it appears that it is not the only group to speak for them—he believes it to be necessary given the scale of change in the rest of the UK. So it may be a bit like the way in which the noble Lord, Lord Forsyth, is briefed about the fact that we cannot seem to get the Scotland Bill down for a day in which we start and end at the time we are supposed to. Everybody blames each other and no one seems to take ownership of the situation. What seems absolutely certain, however, is that we have allowed the differential fee to persist for over 10 years.