My Lords, in response immediately to what the noble Lord, Lord Butler, has just said, there was no doubt that the occasion in July 2008—I will go into it in a little more detail further on—was a fiscal matter. There was no doubt it was government policy and this House demanded that the Government should give it up and insisted that what the Government wanted to do could be done only by primary legislation and not by a statutory instrument. This has been before the House before and the House has done it before.
There are three major issues this House has to consider today. The first is whether financial privilege attaches to this proposition. The second is the effect of the way in which it proceeded through Parliament, and the third is whether any of the amendments is a fatal one.
Let us deal with the constitutional one because we have heard quite a lot about it this afternoon. I totally reject the suggestion made by the Chancellor that somehow or other a vote to postpone the operation of this resolution would be contrary to the financial understandings and conventions that exist between the two Houses. I do not think that is justified. The Government could have avoided these constitutional problems if they had wanted to, had they chosen to legislate for this matter by primary rather than secondary legislation. It would have been open to them to have included these proposals in the Finance Bill. Alternatively, they could have legislated by way of a short and separate Bill. Instead, they chose—it is a government choice, not an opposition choice or anyone else’s—to do it by secondary legislation. That inevitably curtailed debate both here and in the House of Commons and particularly in the country. Of course I accept that it has been dealt with in another place, but inevitably the national discussion has been truncated—to the point almost of extinction. There has been no consultation on transitional measures, nor on measures to alleviate the burden on the poorest—quite the contrary. None of these issues has been even discussed, let alone agreed. We do not know what, if any, transitional measures the Government might have in mind. The Government do not even have the excuse that it was all
put before the country at the general election. It most certainly was not—quite the contrary. Considerable efforts were made to conceal the fact that this was the Government’s intention if they got re-elected. From the Prime Minister down we had Minister after Minister appearing in front of the television cameras and in the press saying it was nothing to do with tax credits and they would tell us what it was eventually. There was not a word in the Conservative manifesto about it. We are now told that in that situation this House willy-nilly has to accept what the Government say. What the Government are asking us to do is not acceptable.
5.45 pm