Again, I shall speak about a number of issues that relate to the bigger principles and can perhaps be considered as a warm-up for the next devolution Bill, which must surely come within a couple of years, as I said in my earlier contribution, to knock the edges off this pioneering Bill, which brings serious devolution to England for the first time in my political lifetime. I tabled a number of amendments and I shall speak first to amendment 2, which is about a constitutional convention.
The work that I have been doing on a constitutional convention, which is the policy of my party and others, becomes ever more pertinent. We do not want to do parts of the jigsaw, but never see the bigger picture. Unless we step back and have a constitutional convention, we will not see how voting systems interlock with the role of a second Chamber, with the nations within the Union, and with the role of independent and devolved local government as the agents of devolution in England.
This is an important Bill providing one part of that jigsaw, but at some point in the next five years we need a mechanism to allow us—hopefully, all parties—to get together, take a pace back and ask, “Where does this leave us? Where does it leave the Union? Where does it leave our democracy?”
I have spoken about the evolutionary approach to English devolution of the Minister and the Secretary of State, and I have commended both. Where does that necessarily piecemeal approach leave us in terms of the future of our country? That cannot be the property of any one party, nor should it be. The parties here have a role as a midwife, ensuring that this concept has a fair wind and is set up properly, is properly funded and provided for and has proper means of public participation, but that is all.
The political parties should take a step back from any convention, whether on local Government or on our wider democracy, and allow the citizens of the United Kingdom their say, perhaps under the auspices of one of the great and the good—an archbishop, a High Court judge or whoever they want to suggest—as worked so well in Scotland. That led to the smooth—it was also protracted, but necessarily so—development of devolution there, culminating in the Scotland Bill that was before us only a few weeks ago.
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I do not expect the Minister to jump up and say, “Fine, we’ll do that”, but I do expect him to acknowledge that there is a point here, which is that we cannot keep doing this stuff piecemeal and that at some point we will need to pull it together. The whole of my private Member’s Bill on a constitutional convention is basically in the amendment paper, including the nuts and bolts that the Political and Constitutional Reform Committee, which I had the privilege of chairing in the previous Parliament, worked very hard on. I have pulled together some of those ideas and put them in an amendment so that they can be read by anyone, at either official or political level, who feels that the concept of a constitutional convention has something to recommend it to the House.
The next issue is one that I know is close to the hearts of Conservative Members: all things European. One of the really good things European was set out in the Maastricht treaty. I forget which Conservative party leader it was—either Mrs Thatcher or Mr Major—who granted us ever-closer union with our European friends. It set out one concept that I think we can all agree on, at least philosophically: subsidiarity—that most ugly word for the most beautiful concept. It essentially means doing things at the lowest appropriate level.
I return to the idea that we must entrench what progress we make. It is not good enough to hope that Whitehall will not want to suck power back, because it will. Having the principle of subsidiarity from the Maastricht treaty and European law embodied in our own law in order to prevent that is something that I think pro-Europeans and anti-Europeans could agree on. It could then be a central tenet of the way we distribute power in the United Kingdom.
A simple amendment incorporating that into British law would give people in devolved local government some security, and something that they could take to
court, if necessary. People at the lower level of the double devolution that I talked about earlier—people in a neighbourhood council, for example, who scraped together a few quid to do good things in their parish—would have a defence, because taking that away from them would be illegal. I hope that the Minister will also look at that proposal, because I think that in the near future, if not now, it should command the respect of the House and find its way into legislation, either supported by a super-majority or hidden behind the Parliament Act 1911.
I will move on now to new clauses 4 to 7 and a constitutional convention. I will pick just one thing that is at the centre of the paradox that the Minister is struggling with—and who would not struggle?—which is that although we are seeking to devolve power, we are, whatever words we choose to dress it up in, imposing the concept of a mayor as the gateway to devolution. I will not get involved in that argument, because in 2020 it will be history and we will look back on it as something that is not all that relevant. However, it is relevant right now, and it is difficult right now.
The argument I put to the Minister is that we ought to be looking at this as something that we can change, work through and evolve, if we consider that at some point we want local government not to be told what system of governance it must have or what electoral system it must operate, but to have the discretion, as an independent institution, to decide on its own governance. If the concept of mayoralty has not taken root after five years, possibly in 80% of England, then it is not a good concept. Some people might say “Fine” to the concept of a mayor, as they would in London now. If we tried to take the concept of a mayor away from people in London, they would resent it greatly. We should let people decide at the end of that period whether they want a council leader, a committee structure, or something else. That would survive the test of time because they would have decided that it was what they wanted.
Exactly the same argument applies to electoral systems. Some people, including me, would say that authorities should be free to decide their own electoral system for local government. If they want all-out councils, election by thirds, the single transferable vote or first past the post, then, in conjunction with the people in their area—that is very important—they should have a debate about that and come to a decision on it. That would be a strong system, but not immutable. People are entitled to say, “We tried the mayor and it didn’t work—we had a succession of people who weren’t very good. We never had that before when we had a more collegiate view.” We should let people make a choice, and let them renew it every so often if that is what they want. I throw that out as an idea; I do not expect the Minister to accept it. If he does, I will be most grateful, but I suspect that it needs to brew a little, perhaps alongside a constitutional convention.
I have tabled many amendments and I am conscious of trying not to use up too much time. The Chair will raise an eyebrow appropriately if I go on too long, but I do not intend to take as much time as I did earlier. Some of my amendments were initiated by the National Association of Local Councils, others by the New Local Government Network, and the one on devolution for all sizes of authorities by Key Cities, but I will deal with the home-grown ones.
The central amendment is about learning the lesson from Scotland. I am sorry that no one from the Scottish National party is in the Chamber at the moment, because their advice would be very helpful. Someone who went to Scotland, even before the referendum, would have gone to a country that has a chunk of income tax assigned to its Government—to the Scottish Parliament. Rather painlessly, four years ago, we passed the Scotland Act 2012, which gave the equivalent of a 10p income tax rate to the Scottish Parliament. The national rate was reduced by 10p and we substituted a Scottish rate of 10p, so nobody paid any more and no elements of equalisation changed, but there was a clear line of account from the Scottish people as taxpayers to their Government in Holyrood.
I am making the radical, earth-shattering, civilisation-ending suggestion that what the Scots did could work for England and that the English people are just as capable of benefiting from such a system as the Scottish people are already. We could assign a chunk of income tax, not directly to every individual local authority, because that would become a nightmare, but, in essence, to the equivalent of the Scottish Government, which would be the Department for Communities and Local Government. That chunk would go to the DCLG as a block of, say, 10p in the pound, through the distribution mechanism, as now, with proper equalisation, as now, and no changes in the rates. That would give everybody a really clear line of account. If it was on people’s wage slips that that chunk of their national income tax went to local government, everyone would suddenly start to take much greater interest in their local government because they would see for the first time that they were spending that chunk of their income tax money on it.