To ask Her Majesty’s Government whether they intend to reduce the number of speed cameras in the United Kingdom.

My Lords, any decision to remove a camera is for local road safety partnerships, not the Government. The Department for Transport’s guidance on the deployment of cameras encourages road safety partnerships regularly to review their camera sites. Cameras in Scotland and Northern Ireland are a matter for the Scottish Parliament and the Northern Ireland Assembly.

I thank the Minister for that reply. The Government would find it easier to persuade motorists that cameras are there for safety rather than revenue reasons if they made greater use of the devices often seen at road works which show the speed of the oncoming car. Does the Minister agree that those devices have more impact and effect on the behaviour of drivers than speed cameras; and that the effect would be greater if there was recourse to the suggested smart traffic lights that would be triggered by the excessive speed of motorists?

My Lords, I hope I will not embarrass the noble Lord if I pay tribute to his contribution to road safety in Northern Ireland when he was First Minister. He is credited with putting road safety firmly on the political agenda: the Northern Ireland safety camera scheme was instituted on his watch. The point that he makes about speed indicator devices and vehicle-activated signs is a good one. They are popular with local authorities because they tell motorists what speed they are doing. The difficulty we find with them is that their effect on driving patterns is short-term. Speed drops for a couple of weeks, but then creeps up again because there is no penalty attached to breaking the speed limit shown on the devices.

Will the noble Lord assure the House that local police forces are not using speed cameras as a substitute for highways policing? While cameras undoubtedly pick up speed, they do not pick up drink-driving, dangerous driving, tailgating and such practices.

My Lords, the days of ring-fencing government funding for safety cameras ended in 2007. A decision on whether safety cameras are installed is now a matter for local determination. In some cases, it is appropriate for local authorities to decide this: others may decide to do it in a different way. We would not want to see cameras used as a means of replacing police or other ways of enforcing speed limits.

My Lords, is not one of the problems the drop in the number of traffic police? There is no more effective way of controlling bad behaviour on the roads than having the physical presence of policemen.

My Lords, our police have many demands on their time and priorities. While there are 16,000 more police now than there were 10 years ago, matters of operational policing are not for the Department for Transport. However, I will draw to the attention of the Home Office the points made by the noble Viscount.

My Lords, will my noble friend comment on the increasingly common use as a deterrent of cardboard police cars on motorway bridges; and does he believe that these things are cut out for the job?

My Lords, any dummy camera or other dummy device would be seen through quite quickly.

My Lords, did the Minister read the excellent article by Simon Jenkins in Tuesday’s Evening Standard, in which he exposed the predatory policies against motorists planned by Westminster City Council? It proposes to make single yellow lines subject to parking restrictions in the evening and to continue charging for parking bays. It is clear that this is intended entirely as a means of taxing the motorist in order to meet Westminster’s funds deficit. Can the Government do anything about it?

My Lords, the noble Lord tempts me, but the Question is about speed cameras in the United Kingdom, not about parking policies in the City of Westminster. I would have thought that there were other ways in which the noble Lord could draw attention to the points that he makes.

I can comment on the role of Transport for London, which is very keen on installing safety cameras. However, it would not be appropriate to comment on Westminster council’s parking policy.

Are Her Majesty's Government in favour of the much reported increased use of average-speed cameras on motorways?

Yes, indeed, we are, my Lords. Average-speed cameras are certainly a way of getting speed limits observed on motorways. I should make it clear—and this goes for the previous questions—that speed cameras are not a way of raising revenue.

Oh!

We would be delighted if they led to not a single fine being imposed because motorists were observing speed limits.

Does my noble friend agree that while the cameras may not be aimed at raising revenue, they are clearly having a deterrent effect on speeding? However, a side-effect has been the vast increase in the number of us who have now become criminals. Does this concern the Minister?

I would have more sympathy with my noble friend if he admitted that what he is doing if he is speeding and picking up fines is wrong and dangerous. Speed kills, and safety cameras are one way of reducing excessive speed.

My Lords, in view of the number of speed cameras now on our roads, can the Minister tell the House what data are kept on each camera to justify it being where it is placed, as well as on the reduction in accidents before and after it is put in place and the amount of fines generated by each camera? Is that information published? If not, why not?

My Lords, the noble Baroness, as is her wont, asks a number of detailed questions. On her first question, what data are kept is a matter for the local safety partnership, which will hold those data. On her other questions, I am afraid that I shall have to write to her.

The Minister said that the cameras are not means of raising revenue. Could he explain why, on the approach to my village, there is a speed limit of 30 mph, which goes up for just a few hundred yards to 40 mph and then down again to 30 mph? I keep meeting people in the village who complain that they have just had the first ticket in their lives for speeding, because they cannot get down to 30 mph again quickly enough after they have just gone up to 40 mph.

My Lords, one of the urban myths in our country is that safety cameras are in place to allow local authorities to raise money. That is not the case. The money from fines imposed as a result of safety camera offences goes into the Consolidated Fund. Up until 2007, the income was hypothecated; it is no longer hypothecated. Whether there should be safety cameras in the noble Baroness’s village is a matter for her local road safety partnership.

To ask Her Majesty’s Government what further steps can be taken to ensure the safety of Antarctic cruise ships.

And now for something completely different, my Lords. The United Kingdom is closely involved in the development of internationally accepted safety criteria within the International Maritime Organisation and the Antarctic Treaty Consultative Meeting. A revised set of guidelines for ships operating in polar waters was recently adopted by the IMO. Additionally, the IMO will develop a comprehensive mandatory instrument for ships operating in polar waters to enhance the current guidelines covering the design, equipment and operation of ships in those waters, including Antarctic cruise ships.

My Lords, I thank the Minister for his interesting and informative reply, but does not the situation have all the ingredients of a disaster waiting for a date? These cruises are becoming increasingly numerous and adventurous and even the old, small but suitable MS “Explorer” sank in 2008. Mercifully, the weather was unusually calm and all were rescued in a few hours. Does not the Minister think that our luck will run out and, if it does, what will the cost be?

My Lords, I draw the noble Earl’s attention to the steps that have been taken since the accident with the merchant vessel “Explorer”, which happily resulted in no loss of life, although I readily accept that that could easily have been a very different outcome if the weather had been different. A lot of work has been carried out within the Antarctic treaty consultative organisations in order to strengthen exactly the points to which the noble Earl refers. For example, it is now necessary for all United Kingdom-organised or originating Antarctic expeditions to have a permit from the Foreign and Commonwealth Office before they can enter those waters. That permit is issued on a number of stringent conditions relating to things such as contingency planning, sufficient arrangements for search and rescue, planning for adverse weather conditions, arrangements for loss of radio, being able to cope with a full evacuation if needed and ensuring that there is proper insurance. The measures have been strengthened considerably and work continues in that area.

My Lords, will the Minister particularly ensure that he safeguards French cruise ships? My Antarctic cruise ship was French, and the food was absolutely magnificent and the wines were absolutely delicious throughout. Worth saving.

I am sure that the noble Lord will be able to go on enjoying his French cruises, as long as the ships comply with the new conditions. I should add that an environmental improvement being made in 2011 is that these ships will not be able to use heavy fuel oil and will have to substitute a lighter fuel oil. That may have an effect on the number of very large cruise liners going there, but I hope that it does not affect the noble Lord’s holiday plans.

Do these safety measures take account of the expanding Antarctic ice cap as a result of global cooling? Do they also take into account the floating ice, which will increase now as a result of this phenomenon?

I sometimes think that questions in your Lordships' House should have something written beside them in ironic script. I suspect that the noble Lord’s question may be one of those. What is happening with climate change in Antarctica is interesting, as different areas are being affected in different ways. Some areas are not being affected at all, and in some parts of the Antarctic peninsula ice is increasing. However, it is also the most rapidly warming part of the planet as well, so the picture is not quite as simple as the noble Lord suggests.

Does the Minister agree that charting is crucial to the safe operation of cruise ships in Antarctica? What is the position with HMS “Endurance”, our ice patrol ship, being out of action? Is the replacement ship fitted with suitable equipment for charting in the area? Is the Minister not aware that many cruise ships make their own charts within the anchorages which they use? These are known as mud charts—and I repeat “mud charts” because the last time I mentioned this when we debated it a year and a half ago, it appeared in Hansard as “mug shots”.

My Lords, I bow to the noble Lord for his knowledge of seafaring. I can tell him that HMS “Endurance” is still at Portsmouth, and has been there since 10 April 2009. A technical investigation and service inquiry continues into the flooding incident that affected her. No decision has yet been taken about the long-term future of HMS “Endurance”. In the mean time, HMS “Scott” is performing a number of very important elements of the ship’s duties, to which the Foreign and Commonwealth Office has agreed. However, HMS “Scott” is not an icebreaker and does not have the ability to land aircraft on her. She is able to operate only in areas clear of a significant ice risk, and probably during the summer down there. The matter is under review and no decision has yet been taken.

My Lords, the Minister gave a number of conditions that are going to have to be met by cruise ships in future in Antarctic and polar waters. Will those ships have to be ice-strengthened as well?

Yes, my Lords, they are not required to be ice-breakers but they need to be ice-strengthened and able to cope with ice.

Are the Government supporting the regulations being developed by the International Maritime Organisation regarding noise emissions from cruise ships—indeed, all ships—given that it is usually older ships that cause a problem with noise, and that there is growing evidence that the noise is affecting the well-being of marine mammals?

The noble Baroness raises an interesting question, to which I am afraid I do not have an answer. If this is an IMO requirement, I am confident that we will insist that those conditions are applied to cruise ships in the Antarctic area as everywhere else. We do not have any evidence that tourism in Antarctica is having an effect on the ecology or indeed on the climate.

My Lords, there are high risks—

Sorry, my Lords, we must move on.

To ask Her Majesty’s Government whether they intend that the Attorney-General should be empowered to review arrest warrants in private prosecutions against political persons.

My Lords, as my noble friend Lord Bach said last week in response to a similar Question, Her Majesty’s Government are looking at this issue urgently. I regret, however, that the week that has elapsed has not been sufficient to bring the matter to a conclusion and I can only say again that no decisions have yet been made.

I thank the Minister for that reply. Do the Government accept, however, that the paramount requirement is to sustain the commitment of this country to enable war crimes under the Geneva Convention to continue to be triable in English courts? Will the Government further recognise that the political nature of the roles of the Law Officers makes it highly unsuitable that they should be empowered to prevent arrests from taking place?

My Lords, on the first question, Her Majesty’s Government have no intention to restrict the so-called universal jurisdiction, for which, as a party to certain international conventions, the UK has legislated in respect of some grave offences. We take our commitment to tackling serious international crimes extremely seriously. The role of the Law Officers in any proposal that the Government may bring forward will be addressed when those proposals are brought forward.

My Lords, in what possible circumstances, where there is a prima facie case against someone for whom an arrest warrant has been issued and where no extradition agreement is involved, would we decide not to proceed in the trying of that person?

My Lords, the level of evidence that a court needs to issue an arrest warrant is well short of the presumption that a case can succeed. Before a case would be prosecuted, the final decision would be made by the Attorney-General. The considerations that she would take into account would certainly include whether or not a case would be likely to succeed and would be in the public interest. There is no requirement for a magistrates’ court to take those issues into account in deciding to issue an arrest warrant.

My Lords, will the review bear in mind what would have happened in 1992, if I remember correctly, if Saddam Hussein had turned up in London having committed the crime of hostage taking under international law?

My Lords, the offences of a universal jurisdiction would undoubtedly have meant that the state would have taken action in those circumstances, unless Saddam Hussein had come in a way where diplomatic immunity protected him. If he was so protected, that protection would apply, just as it does all over the world, but the state would certainly proceed against any citizen not so protected, if there was a proper case. It is difficult to believe that those negotiating these treaties had in mind the circumstance of a private individual going to a court for an arrest warrant. It is clear that the duty is on the state. This state—the British Government—does not stand away from those duties to proceed against individuals where, after proper investigation, there is a proper case.

My Lords, we are talking on this Question purely about private prosecutions being brought. Those private prosecutions, as we know, can do immense damage to our standing in the world. I am thinking of the recent occasion where a former Israeli Minister was unable to visit this country because of the threat of such a private prosecution. Could not the Government move somewhat more quickly in looking at the role of the Attorney-General and might it not have been possible for the Attorney-General herself to have answered this Question?

My Lords, the Government are very much seized of the event and its consequences. The Foreign Secretary said:

“We are determined to protect and develop these ties … Israeli leaders—like leaders from other countries—must be able to visit and have a proper dialogue with the British Government”.

It is the Government’s wish that those things can take place. Nevertheless, we have this relatively unique private prosecution in UK law; it is in the same form only in Australia and New Zealand. We need to look at its role. There are these three things to look at together: universal jurisdiction, the matter of the leaders and private prosecution. Those three coming together do not make this a simple problem, which is why it is taking some time. The Government are seized of the need to address this with urgency.

My Lords, the last exchange referred to the specific circumstances that gave rise to the urgent review. In conducting that review, will the Minister accept that important legal and constitutional issues arise, particularly given the serious nature of the offences involved? Given the statement last July by the Justice Secretary on the relationship between the Attorney-General and, inter alia, the Director of Public Prosecutions, guaranteeing prosecutorial independence, does he not think that there is, at the very least, an argument for reform in the opposite direction—namely, that charging decisions in such cases should move from the Attorney-General to the DPP? Can the Minister offer any reassurance that such a change will be considered? Does he agree that it is always better to consider law reform on the basis of principle rather than as an ad hoc response to a particular case, however sensitive?

My Lords, without getting into the generality of that question, let me say that my understanding of these crimes is that they are handled by a specialist unit in the Metropolitan Police. The decision to go to charge is made by the CPS. In the present situation, the Attorney-General enters the process only on the final decision of whether to prosecute.

To ask Her Majesty’s Government what is their response to the decline in the number of pupils studying a language after the age of 14, as reported in the 2009 Language Trends survey published on 20 January.

My Lords, the Government are taking action on a range of policies to reform language learning. We aim to boost take-up, post-14, in line with the late Lord Dearing’s recommendations in his 2007 review. We are introducing compulsory language learning in primary schools and encouraging increased take-up at secondary schools through the Routes into Languages programme. We are confident that, over time, these and other measures will mean more young people learning languages.

I thank the Minister for that Answer. Does he accept that the achievements in primary schools will be completely undermined if secondary schools continue to ignore the benchmark of 50 to 90 per cent of pupils taking a language until they are 16? Will he tell the House why Ofsted inspections no longer even ask a question about the take-up of languages, despite languages being designated—along with science and maths—as strategically important and vulnerable subjects?

We continue to recognise the ongoing challenges posed by issues such as the impact of the transition from primary to secondary school on language learning; that is a concern. We know from research by the National Foundation for Educational Research in 2009, published by the OU today, that some progress has been made in schools over the three years of the project, but we are not complacent. We have taken steps to address the issue for the key stage 2 framework for languages, such as guidance for teachers in the primary languages training zone. As I am sure the noble Baroness knows, we have trained a lot more teachers in languages for primary education.

It is not true to say that Ofsted no longer examines languages at secondary level. The inspection of schools will continue to cover the quality of teaching and learning in the curriculum and how it meets the needs of pupils. There has never been a specific requirement to cover modern foreign languages. Ofsted continues to carry out its rolling three-year subject reports into the teaching of each national curriculum subject, including modern foreign languages. The next one for languages is due in the autumn term of 2010.

Can my noble friend say a little more about the Business Language Champions programme, such as how many schools are involved? Has he recognised that there is a discrepancy in the report between state and independent schools in the teaching of some of the lesser-taught languages like Mandarin? What can he do to repair the damage within the state schools? What more can be done to bring independent and state schools together for the purpose of these specialised language opportunities?

There is significant, but mostly anecdotal, evidence among UKTI colleagues and business development professionals in the regions and overseas that UK businesses, in common with most EU economies, lose out due to a lack of language skills and awareness. So we understand the need.

On encouragement, while the numbers enrolled in courses for joint language honours degrees have increased by 5 per cent, the broad trends also conceal differences between individual languages; for example, numbers for Spanish, Chinese and Japanese studies have increased dramatically. In addition, an unrecorded number of students take a language module as part of their degree, and more than 25,000 are doing courses in their spare time. The National Centre for Languages is producing guidance and case studies on schools engaging with employers, and is working with employers to engage with schools.

My Lords, does the Minister accept that foreign exchange trips are really helpful to young people who are learning languages? Yet a lot of schools are very reluctant to carry them out; indeed, the survey says that only 40 per cent of schools have them. What are the Government doing to help schools overcome the practical difficulties, and the anxieties of parents about the safeguarding of their children and the vetting procedures in the foreign countries concerned?

I will have to get back to the noble Baroness about the safeguarding; I have no comment on that. However, there are other ways to achieve the same benefits. For example, there is a good project, Connecting Classrooms, which uses the internet as a way of achieving contact between schools from different countries. The British Council is involved in a number of those projects. I am not denying the importance of foreign trips. I am just saying that we ought to use the technology in imaginative ways to encourage young people to stay with language learning.

My Lords, does the Minister agree that foreign visits and family exchanges play an important role in learning a foreign language and about different ways of life? Can he tell me whether the new vetting scheme is likely to deter even more schools from organising these visits?

I agree with the noble Baroness about the importance of foreign trips, but I will have to get back to her on vetting.

My Lords, I am sure the Minister agrees that we are living in a global economy. Therefore, languages are absolutely crucial to most of our economies. What are the Government doing about training and retraining teachers in this important aspect to ensure that they get the message over to their students?

My Lords, we have trained more than 5,000 teachers in primary languages specialism and will continue to support the training of the workforce through this programme. We will continue to provide professional development opportunities for existing teachers to develop their language teaching skills.

My Lords, with four out of 10 children leaving primary school—

My Lords—

My Lords, I am afraid it is the Government’s turn.

It was the turn of the Front Bench.

Speaking from the Back Benches, and going to the original point made by the noble Baroness, Lady Coussins, about the transition from primary to secondary, does my noble friend agree with me that the most important thing in embedding a love of language in young children is that it should be enjoyed for its own sake and not as a means to an end? In what ways are the Government encouraging primary school teaching to instil a spirit of enjoyment in those who learn languages?

I thank my noble friend for that question. I absolutely agree with her. We know that compulsory language learning in secondary education did not guarantee success. CILT, the National Centre for Languages, is spreading best practice on imaginative approaches to teaching foreign languages. Schools are adopting interesting approaches. A school in Devon is introducing French into the teaching of physical education and there are other examples of schools teaching languages alongside other subjects to sustain interest in learning languages.

That the debate on the Motion in the name of Lord McNally set down for today shall be limited to two and a quarter hours and that in the name of Lord Tyler to three hours.

My Lords, it has come to light that the time limits shown on the speakers list for the second debate today, in the name of the noble Lord, Lord Tyler, add up to four minutes more than the two and three-quarter hours proposed for the debate. Rather than reducing the Back-Bench time limit from six minutes to five, it may be for the convenience of the House if the time limit for the second debate is three hours.

To call attention to the case for a fairer and more progressive tax system; and to move for papers.

My Lords, this debate takes place against two interesting pieces of data that have been published this week: first, the figures showing that the UK is barely out of recession; and, secondly, the study of the growing disparity between rich and poor in our society. The timing is good for another reason. In all probability, this will be the last Liberal Democrat debate day before the general election and perhaps the last time that we will sit on these Benches for such a debate. We have divided the day into two parts united by the common theme of fairness. First, we will discuss our taxation and how its fairness, or lack of it, impinges on all aspects of our society. Then we will look at constitutional reform and how progress on that front, or lack of it, influences the quality of our politics and political institutions and public respect for both.

The debate and themes are timely not only because of the impending general election but because it is exactly 100 years since this House took on the great reforming Liberal Government over the People’s Budget; the clash over that was the catalyst for the first attempt at House of Lords reform, which passed this House 100 years ago this coming August. However, our emphasis on fairness is not simply part of some historical tradition. We on these Benches believe that fairness has to be at the core of government policy because, if it is not, we will not retain our social cohesion in the hard times that lie ahead.

Let me give two illustrations of what I mean. Your Lordships will recall that a couple of weeks ago I complained about the disruption on the Bedford to Brighton train line. Some of those disruptions were caused by a pay dispute with ASLEF drivers. I criticised the drivers at the time and called on them to act with a sense of wider social responsibility to those who rely on their services. In the years ahead, how are we going to persuade workers in the public and private sectors to accept any kind of pay restraint or wider social responsibility while the bonus culture runs rampant and senior bankers insist on paying themselves in figures that look like telephone numbers?

Let me give a more poignant example. I recently saw an interview on television given by the father of a young soldier killed in Afghanistan. In simple terms, the father said that his son had pride in this country and believed that he was fighting to defend it against its enemies; he said that both he and his son thought that such sacrifice was worth while. How do we repay such patriotism if we give in to those who say, “Pay us what we want or we are going to leave this country”?

Although today’s debates are timely in their historical context, it is about tomorrow that we want to talk. We do so because the social cohesion—the togetherness—that is needed to weather the coming storms will require an awareness of that need, which is absent thus far from the approaches of both Labour and the Conservatives. Labour and, in particular, the Prime Minister told us that they had discovered the alchemy that ended boom and bust, but then led us into the worst recession in 80 years. Now the Prime Minister sits brooding in his bunker wondering whether to unleash class war against Mr Cameron and the rest of the Bullingdon Club.

Mr Cameron and Mr Osborne, meanwhile, talk of our broken society, but then are specific only about tax breaks for the rich. Perhaps the noble Baroness, Lady Noakes, can clarify the confusion over tax breaks for married couples, which on our last analysis would affect about 6 per cent of them. Off-message talk from the hard men in the Conservatives’ ranks, such as the noble Lord, Lord Forsyth, is of a slash-and-burn approach to our public sector, reminiscent of the 1980s when Conservative dogma destroyed 20 per cent of our industrial base and left scars in many communities that have not healed to this day.

Will the noble Lord give way?

Ah!

I am most grateful to the noble Lord. I think that he is referring to the fact that I said that by the end of the next Parliament it would be necessary to reduce public expenditure by £75 billion. Given that the structural deficit is nearly £90 billion, how on earth can he describe that as slash and burn? Should we not have an honest debate with the electorate?

Deus ex machina. I am sorry that the noble Lord did not put his name down to speak, because he would have made a great contribution. This debate turns on exactly that issue. There are lots of very easy—rather, relatively simple—ways of saying how we can correct the deficit. I would argue that, if you do that in a way that is perhaps appealing to him and some of his colleagues, the social disruption that will ensue will cause great damage to the fabric of our society.

That is why, in response to these twin failures, the Liberal Democrats’ response has been to put forward proposals on public spending. These caused the Financial Times to write of Nick Clegg, in an editorial on 20 January:

“On the deficit, the Lib Dem leader is proving that honesty is the best politics”.

Our approach to taxation has been equally frank. We do not believe that we will retain cohesion in our society if the poorest wage earners pay a greater proportion of their income in tax than the richest. That is why we will close tax loopholes for the rich and take those earning £10,000 a year and less out of income tax altogether. Our tax reforms would also mean that aspirational middle-class families would receive a fair return for their hard work. The rich and the super-rich will be asked to pay more. In return, they will have the continuing benefit of living in a country that has social harmony and is at peace with itself. We on these Benches take second place to no one in defending individual freedom and the right of everyone to develop his or her talents to the full, but we also insist that, in pursuit of a fair and just society, all should contribute to ensuring that all our citizens enjoy a certain quality of life.

I think that we all know that we are in a phoney war period. I acknowledge that there are tough times ahead, but very few of us have yet to feel the pain because of the stimulus measures that the Government have taken, which we support. Vince Cable spelt out the dilemma on Monday, including the question of,

“how quickly to rectify the budget deficit. Delaying action on the budget risks a secondary infection: a sovereign risk crisis leading to higher borrowing costs. But treatment that is too abrupt—sending off the sickly patient to do 200 press ups in the gym—risks a fresh heart attack: a relapse into recession”.

What lie ahead are hard choices and fine judgments. That is why, as the noble Lord, Lord Forsyth, has just mentioned, we need a much more candid and open debate about both tax and spend. A week ago, Nick Clegg started that process by putting on hold some cherished Liberal Democrat policy pledges and spending commitments on free personal care, more generous citizens’ pensions and universal childcare. These are undoubtedly popular but not realistically affordable, given the mountain that we have to climb.

Both Nick Clegg and Vince Cable have been equally frank about other commitments, including a public sector incomes policy, fundamental reform of public sector pensions, cuts in welfare spending where it impinges on the rich, and attacking the command and control system of Britain’s central government, which puts such a burden on both local government and the NHS. We also have to take a serious look at the substantial costs of defence procurement.

Neither Labour nor the Conservatives have matched the Liberal Democrats for candour, yet the next election cannot simply be a competition about the various alternatives of joy through suffering. Last week, I was sent a report by a symposium looking at the Canadian experience, where tough decisions were taken against a background of open debate and widespread government consultation. The scare stories have already started about the dangers of a hung Parliament, but I believe that a far greater danger is if either the Conservatives or Labour continue to conceal their real intentions and then, in government, try to force though a hitherto hidden agenda on the basis of support that in fact could reflect less that 30 per cent of the electorate.

Whatever Government are in power after the general election, they will, as I said, have to retain social cohesion and widespread public support for the measures necessary to right our economy. The public have to feel that the process is fair, that the pain and rewards are fairly distributed and that those who caused the crisis are justly dealt with.

That brings us to the question of banking reform. It is a matter that goes beyond the remit of today’s debate; nevertheless, it is at the heart of social cohesion. Again, my colleague Vince Cable has been clearest on this matter. In that respect, he has heeded the words of that great Liberal, Winston Churchill, who warned more than 80 years ago against policies that raised finance too high and brought industry too low.

On that front, my noble friend Lord Cotter will be dealing specifically with the challenges facing medium and small-sized businesses—so often the generators of new jobs and new wealth in any economy. What is certain is that sustained recovery will rely on the private sector, especially small and medium-sized businesses, to generate jobs. For this to be possible, we will have to create a business environment conducive to starts-ups and small business, centring on moderate taxes, getting rid of red tape, securing intellectual property rights and ensuring that there is a flow of credit on competitive terms. My noble friends Lady Walmsley and Lady Hamwee will be making similar calls for joined-up government as it applies to young people and to local government.

What the country needs now is not disjointed panic measures but a clear understanding not only of the specific measures that the parties intend to put forward to deal with the present crisis but also of the underlying philosophy behind them. I return to the Financial Times editorial that I quoted earlier. It said:

“Over the past year, the British politicians have mastered the art of talking about fiscal policy without saying anything”.

Of course, we have one of the grand masters of the art replying for the Government today. The FT went on to say that,

“the only national party that has publicly come to terms with the scale of the fiscal crisis is the Liberal Democrats”.

We have done so with a candour not yet matched by either Labour or the Conservatives and we have done so with a sense of fairness absent from both.

One of the most powerful cartoons from the 1920s showed our society as a ladder coming out of flood water. On the top is an obviously wealthy toff, on the middle rung an example of the middle classes and, below him, with his head just above the water, a working-class man. The toff at the top of the ladder is saying, “Listen, I think we are all going to have to take one step down”. The cartoon is headed “Equality of Sacrifice”. We will not get through the storms ahead with that kind of equality of sacrifice. That is why I am proud that this party, a party of conscience and reform, is willing to put forward a fairer alternative to this House today and to the country whenever a general election is called.

My Lords, I agree with the noble Lord, Lord McNally, that economic policy should be developed in a spirit of fairness. I am sorry that he did not acknowledge that the Government have already moved to increase the top rate of income tax to 50 pence and all that the Government have done to help families on low incomes through the tax credit system.

It is clear that public expenditure will be more and more constrained as the Government wrestle to bring the deficit down to satisfy the markets and reduce the burden of debt on our children and our children’s children. In due course—the timing, as the noble Lord said, will be a matter for very fine judgment—we hope that the private sector will successfully take over the strain of driving economic recovery and growth. Correspondingly, we should hope that the private sector will contribute more towards the provision of public services. More than ever, we will need a mixed economy in service provision.

It is ironic that services that we have kept in the public sector precisely because they are so important to our national life, notably health and education, were for so long chronically underfunded in consequence of the necessary limits on public expenditure. I am very pleased that the Government have increased spending as much as they have done on health and education, but year-on-year real terms increases, outstripping the growth of the private sector, could not go on for ever and retrenchment will have to happen.

If we are to maintain the level and quality of public services through the process of fiscal rebalancing, we shall need to enlist more resources from the private sector. I want to talk about only one aspect of this and its implications for the tax regime. We need to improve the incentives through the tax system for charitable giving. Noble Lords may ask, “What has this to do with a fairer and more progressive tax system? Aren’t tax breaks for charitable giving a system of reliefs for the rich?”, as the noble Lord, Lord McNally, just suggested. I would respond that they are a means to a fairer tax system because, to the extent that they relieve the pressures on the public purse, they lighten the personal tax burden that would otherwise fall unjustly down the income scale and they relieve the corporate tax burden that would otherwise damage employment. Tax reliefs that help to make possible better funded public services and more employment make for a fairer and more progressive society.

Perhaps I may propose a handful of specific suggestions. My noble friend Lord Mandelson has already signalled significant reductions in planned expenditure on higher education. A few years ago, a task force on voluntary giving to higher education, chaired by Professor Eric Thomas, Vice-Chancellor of Bristol University, submitted a report to the Department for Education and Skills. Its most important recommendation has not been acted on.

At paragraph 10 on page 7, the report states:

“The current tax relief rules prevent donors from deriving an income from, or retaining an interest in, gifts of assets or property to charities. With significant amounts of wealth tied-up in property, these rules are stopping the development of innovative schemes to encourage such gifts. In the USA such schemes, known as ‘planned giving vehicles’, are used to donate significant amounts to the higher education sector. They provide donors with tax relief and regular income in their lifetime whilst guaranteeing the institution capital on the death of donors. With widespread ownership of assets amongst alumni coming up to retirement, and a historically low number of offspring amongst which to leave this wealth, the time is right to develop such schemes in the UK”.

There is a fuller discussion of planned giving on pages 47 to 49. Brief descriptions are given of specific planned giving vehicles that have greatly benefited American universities: remainder interests in personal residence, charitable gift annuities, pooled income funds, charitable remainder trusts and charitable lead trusts.

The report accepts that where a donor retains an interest in an asset gifted, the market value of that interest should be deducted before calculating the true charitable value of the gift for tax relief purposes. The key recommendation is that, instead of the whole gift being treated as ineligible for tax relief—as happens at present in the UK—as in the US, an assessment should be made of what proportion of the gift is charitable and should attract tax relief, with the remainder being taxable. With money raised in that way, universities could for example fund bursaries to support students from low-income households and outreach programmes to encourage more people from households and communities that have not traditionally gone to university to do so.

Tax relief on lifetime giving and on lifetime legacies is a theme also of the Campaign for Private Giving, led by the National Museums Directors’ Conference, the Museums, Libraries and Archives Council and the Arts Council for England, supported by a wide range of cultural bodies, including the Art Fund, English Heritage and the University Museums Group.

As the House is aware, university museums and galleries face a particular threat that their core funding from HEFCE will no longer be protected. That core funding provides the platform for their fundraising and for the benefits that university museums and galleries bring to university teaching and research, as well as to schools, the general public and the wider cultural economy. The case of university museums and galleries illustrates very well the good sense of shaping policy to achieve a better complementarity between public and private funding. The Government exhort universities and cultural institutions to engage more in self-help, to raise more from private sources. They have a corresponding duty to ensure that the scheme of tax reliefs is precisely and efficiently designed to help them do that. That is even more important in a period when less national lottery money is available for the arts and heritage.

To recite the names of university museums and galleries—Whitworth, Hunter, Sainsbury, Courtauld—is to be reminded that great cultural institutions in this country were founded by philanthropists. That tradition must be sustained. Through gifts that can enrich the cultural lives of everyone, as well as through contributions to the betterment of education, of health, of the lives of people who are disabled or homeless, donors also encourage generosity in others, co-operation and the social cohesion to which the noble Lord, Lord McNally, rightly drew our attention several times. That is always precious, and particularly so in hard economic times.

There is much scope to increase giving among those who are well-off in this country. As the campaign says, we need to encourage people to give and we need to make it easier to give. In the cultural field, the Government should ease the complicated restrictions on what charitable organisations can claim from gift aid in relation to admissions charges and the benefits that come from belonging to supporters’ organisations. Those restrictions make it harder to build up the crucial long-term relationships between institutions and donors. Importantly, also, tax relief should be extended, as in the USA, to cover the gift of objects that would be valuable additions to the collections of museums, galleries, libraries and archives. Our “acceptance in lieu” scheme works well if the donor has died. Comparable benefits through income tax and CGT relief should be available to the living who wish to donate important cultural objects.

In support of archives, the Government should improve the douceur scheme, so that it is extended to income tax and the benefit is split 50:50 between the writer and the collecting institution. In the heritage field, the Historic Houses Association, representing the owners of historic houses, who enable all to share in one of the greatest cultural legacies of this country, is very reasonably asking the Government for a tax regime which will support the maintenance of historic buildings for the public benefit.

If in politics we have moved beyond left and right, as my noble friend Lord Giddens has taught us to think, so in the provision of public services, we should move beyond the sterile antithesis of public and private. Collectively, we can find the resources to do what is needed.

My Lords, I spent a good deal of my time in my practice as a barrister dealing with taxation. I was a member of the Institute for Fiscal Studies and sat on some of its committees. The amount of tax needed to be raised varies from year to year, but there are principles that apply to taxation that do not vary. One principle is fairness. Another is that, so far as possible—and I am afraid that that is not very far—taxation should be comprehensible. The classic example of unfairness was the poll tax. It was so unfair that even people who benefited from other people having to pay it recognised it was unfair. It plainly played a crucial part in forcing the resignation of Mrs Thatcher, as she then was, as Prime Minister.

It has been accepted for a century—indeed, ever since Lloyd George’s famous Budget of 1909—that income tax, in particular, should be progressive; that is, that those who have higher incomes should pay a larger proportion of their income than those with lower incomes. I agree with that principle. I believe our party view on this matter is correct: those on the lowest income should not be liable for income tax at all and those with annual incomes above a starting point of £150,000 or £200,000 a year should, at least for the time being, pay a 50 per cent rate of income tax on the income above that starting point.

One point that concerns me is the recent increase in national insurance contributions. Employers’ national insurance contributions are a tax on employment and should not be increased during a time of recession, but they have been. National insurance contributions as a whole need to be reconsidered. Few of those who pay NICs understand how they work. Most people think that NICs go into a pool that will pay for their pensions on their retirement. That is not the case. NICs do not go into a reservoir; they go into a pipe that sprays out money for current pensions. Recent increases in NICs should have been introduced as increases in income tax. They have been introduced as increases in NICs simply to conceal from the public the fact that the Government are reneging on their promises not to increase income tax. When the time arose, they should have said that it was no longer possible to stick to that promise. At the very least, employees’ NICs should be paid on the whole of the employee’s income. There should be no ceiling. Even so, NICs mean that more tax is payable on earned income than on investment income. That is not desirable, and it may be worth considering that employees’ NICs should be absorbed into income tax, at least for those under retirement age. I should, I suppose, declare an interest as I am over retirement age.

Inheritance tax—IHT—is also a matter of fairness. Encouraging people to work in order to leave money to help their children is perfectly legitimate and effective but, taken too far, reductions in IHT would unduly protect hereditary wealth. There has to be a balance. At present, the balance is not unfair to those who pay inheritance tax. Indeed, I think we should consider restoring a tax liability on large gifts, not the ordinary year-to-year gifts, that are made more than seven years before the death of the donor.

I turn to making the tax laws comprehensible. I am afraid that the Prime Minister was disastrous at that when he was Chancellor of the Exchequer. He inherited a tax system that was rather good, due to a large extent to the noble Lord, Lord Lawson of Blaby, whom I am sorry to see is not here today. For example, the noble Lord produced a very sensible system for capital gains tax by making capital gains in real terms taxable at the same rate as income tax. That put an end to tax advisers trying endlessly to convert income into capital gains. The noble Lord’s schemes also produced a fair basis of taxation for trusts.

Under the chancellorship of the now Prime Minister, capital gains tax and taxes on trusts have been made far more complicated and much less fair. Year after year, the Finance Act becomes more and more obese —a little tweak here, a small relief there, the blocking of a minor loophole somewhere else—making it incomprehensible to at least 99.9 per cent of the population: indeed, to fewer than that, because 99.9 per cent means that one person in every thousand understands it, and I do not think that the number is anywhere near that. This achieves next to nothing, and printing huge Finance Acts simply increases government spending and global warming.

Finally, and more seriously, we need to look at tax avoidance, which loses billions of pounds every year. I confess that my practice as a barrister involved a number of tax avoidance schemes, some of which were unbelievably complicated, and I found myself disliking them more and more as time went on. It is a sort of game. Clever tax lawyers or accountants invent some mystic way of converting income into capital or create imaginary losses as deductions from profits. After a short time, normally, the Government learn about the scheme and stop it by putting some new and equally incomprehensible provisions into the next Finance Bill.

We need wide-ranging, broad and general legislation to block tax avoidance by depriving all artificial schemes of tax benefits. That is easier said than done, I admit. Attempts have been made in some other countries and have failed, but they can succeed. The key to success is to create uncertainty as to what may or may not impose tax liability. Lawyers and accountants hate uncertainty because they cannot give definite advice, but a major blow to tax avoidance schemes was struck in 1981 by the decision by the then Appellate Committee of your Lordships’ House in the case of Ramsay v Inland Revenue Commissioners. The decision was unexpected. It said that steps in a scheme that had no purpose except to create an artificial loss should simply be ignored. For a considerable time after that, many avoidance schemes were dropped because of the uncertainty as to whether they would succeed. We need to apply that principle more widely.

That is the way forward. Tax avoidance through artificial schemes is morally wrong and should always be legally wrong.

My Lords, I declare an interest as chief executive of London First, a non-profit-making business membership organisation that works to secure London’s competitiveness as a location for globally mobile business.

I congratulate the noble Lord, Lord McNally, on securing this debate. From a business perspective, taxes fund investment, which is vital to our competitiveness: from heavy infrastructure such as Crossrail through to essential social services such as education. Notwithstanding the debate raging in America, few businesses in the UK would covet the health insurance bills that American businesses pay, and by providing the resource for a safety net taxes create the necessary social support for flexible labour markets. I therefore firmly believe that taxes, with a redistributive element, are the price that we pay in Britain for an effective economy as well as a civilised society. There are, however, very different views of what constitute fairer taxes and where the incidence of progression should lie, which is where the nub of this debate lies.

Many of the arguments for progressive taxation were forged in the Britain of 100 years ago when there was a large, poor working class, a relatively small middle class and a geographically immobile upper class, many of whom sat in your Lordships’ House. Now Britain has a vastly expanded middle class. In 1939, 10 million people paid income tax; now the number is around 30 million. The rich—I might even say the nouveau riche—generate their wealth from geographically mobile talents and capital.

Colbert, Louis XIV's Finance Minister, said that taxation was the art of plucking a goose while generating the least amount of hissing. Like it or not, the rich these days will not come to or stay in this country if they are in for a disproportionate plucking. The recent KPMG study, showing that £1 million earners in the UK keep less of their income than in any other developed economy, was read worldwide. Would anyone who earns, or aspires to earn, that sort of money not be discouraged by such a cap on ambition? Of course, London and the UK score highly on many other factors, including quality of life, language, and multiculturalism. Who wants to go out on the town in Zurich?

While we can afford to have top rates which are not the lowest, we cannot afford to have the highest. In any case, there just are not enough rich people to provide us all with the levels of public expenditure we might like. The PBR estimates that the yield from income tax this year will be around £130 billion. The Treasury forecasts that the 10 per cent increase in the top rate from 40 per cent to 50 per cent will raise around £2.5 billion. That, too, is contested because it does not take account of other lost revenues; for example, through VAT when the money is spent. The Treasury may underestimate the dynamic effect of people working less hard, reorienting their tax exposure or just plain leaving the country. Nor does it take account of companies with headquarters outside Europe which are considering where to locate a European regional office, but which may discount the UK because it is considered to be a tax unfriendly jurisdiction. Treasury models never take account of what they cannot see.

The 50 per cent higher rate of income tax represents an important psychological milestone. According to colleagues who regularly work across the Atlantic or in the Far East, it is perceived as a reason why not to come to London. The Institute for Fiscal Studies calculates workplace tax rates for the highest earners at 66 per cent. If this issue is not addressed, we will see the converse of the Thatcher reduction in income tax; that is, a steadily declining contribution from the rich to the Exchequer in the medium term. By comparison, an increase in the basic rate of just 1 per cent raises £4 billion, according to the latest Treasury ready reckoner. The inconvenient truth is that funding good-quality public services requires substantial contributions from the many, not just the few. As we move to close the deficit, how we go about this matters.

My premise is that we want to close the deficit in the manner which does least damage to sustainable economic growth—the first and best way of raising revenue for the Exchequer and creating prosperity. International experience suggests that a mix of roughly 80 per cent spending cuts and 20 per cent tax increases may be the most sustainable way of achieving this outcome. So how will the 20 per cent from tax increases be realised? The Government need to be very wary of taxes which inhibit economic growth over the next few years. We have a high mountain of debt to climb and without economic growth we will be on a slippery slope rather than the cable car to the top. Those taxes which threaten international competitiveness—indeed, which fail to build on our unique position in the world—and those which discourage enterprise or corporate investment should be touched with extreme caution.

If we consider areas where our tax system is less fierce internationally or where we might provide leadership, two taxes merit further consideration. First, VAT could be brought more in line with the rest of the EU, particularly if it is levied on items where purchase is discretionary rather than essential. Secondly, if the UK led international moves towards green-based taxes it would raise revenue while discouraging unsustainable behaviour by business and consumers.

Whatever the next Government decide is the right solution to this conundrum, a vital component is the clear signalling of the way forward. There should be no sudden changes of tack and a thorough consultation with the marketplace to avoid those easy unintended consequences. The uncomfortable truth is that the heavy lifting may have to be done by taxes with a broad base, such as the basic rate of income tax or the standard rate of VAT. But I suspect that this is a view which is most easily expressed from the Cross Benches.

My Lords, I am in the process of writing a book about political jokes and I dipped into my books to find jokes about taxation, some of which, I suspect, have been told already. For example, income tax forms should be printed on Kleenex because so many of us have to pay through the nose; of course you cannot take it with you, but with inheritance tax you cannot leave it behind either. This shows two characteristics of jokes about taxation: first, they seem to be uniformly weak, as noble Lords will have noticed; secondly, they are all about the imposition of tax by the state on individuals as a kind of arbitrary, dogmatic extraction of revenue without legitimacy.

The obverse should be seen to be the case—I am pleased that several previous contributors to the debate have said so—which is that taxation is a key feature of citizenship and a means of social solidarity. Countries that have lax, low taxation rates do not have high levels of social cohesion. Taxation, therefore, should be seen as a positive obligation of citizenship. This observation is also true of progressive taxation. In all industrial countries, the distribution of income and wealth is more equal post rather than pre taxation.

There is also a close and notable correlation between taxation as a proportion of GDP and the egalitarian nature of a society. Countries which are reasonably or strongly egalitarian all have tax ratios of more than 40 per cent of GDP, some substantially over that proportion. Incidentally, we know from Scandinavian countries that a higher ratio of taxation to GDP does not inhibit economic growth and prosperity if you get your act right.

When Labour came into power in 1997 it was faced with a specific problem—that over the previous 20 years the level of economic inequality in this country had risen more steeply than in any other industrial country apart from New Zealand, which also followed at that point liberal free-market policies. In responding to this, however, Labour Governments since 1997 have been wise in not responding with a knee-jerk leftism. It is important to emphasise that progressive taxation is not only about tax rates; it should be understood as the overall impact of a taxation system on the distribution of income and, therefore, the distribution of economic inequality.

There are four main points of new Labour fiscal policy which are important, all of which should be sustained whatever happens next. First, the key emphasis is that it is important to reconcile taxation with wealth and job creation. Tax systems always have implications for wealth creation and it is important to achieve a balance between the two. As I have mentioned, new Labour was especially influenced by the Scandinavian countries, which show that you can have generous tax revenues and a strong welfare state but also be highly competitive in the world marketplace. It surprises some people to know that Finland regularly came top of the World Economic Forum index as the best country in the world in which to do business and that Denmark was often either top or second for quite a long while.

Secondly, it is important to recognise that fiscal systems influence behaviour, and that, where possible, this should be mobilised in a positive way. This is the reason why Labour introduced tax credits. Despite problems with their implementation, I remain a supporter. They have a notable positive side: they are not seen as discriminatory or stigmatising, as orthodox benefits are, and they can also have the positive effect of getting people into work. For that reason, I am not so sure about the policy mentioned by the noble Lord, Lord McNally, of eliminating income tax for those earning below £10,000, because it could create a new poverty trap and does not have the positive consequence of helping to get people into work.

Thirdly, we must deal with the reason for the jokes. A progressive tax system must be integrated with substantial welfare and public service reform. That was the point of introducing into the public services more devolution, choice, flexibility and accountability to the customer. It should be seen as part of Labour's overall package.

Fourthly, it made, and still makes, sense to treat child poverty and redistribution towards children as a fundamental part of what a redistributive tax system should be. We are now at a new stage. My colleague at the LSE, John Hills, to whom I pay tribute, yesterday produced a report from the National Equality Panel. It shows that Britain is a highly unequal country. It shows something that we already knew: that wealth is much more unequal than income. It shows that there is a lot of work to do. However, it also shows two things about Labour's accomplishments. One thing Labour has achieved is to stabilise overall economic inequality. In other industrial countries, including Scandinavian ones, economic inequality has continued to climb. That is not an insubstantial achievement. Moreover, if you look at those in the poorest groups, the Hills report shows that the poorest 10 per cent of the population are 25 per cent better off than they would have been without the tax policies that Labour introduced.

I have used a lot of my time, but we are now at a new stage. We need new policies to attack the inequalities that the Hills report indicates. Briefly, there should be four parts to such a policy framework. First, sustain the emphasis on child poverty, but fund it properly: in other words, inject more money. Secondly, respecting what has been said, keep up the pressure on high earners. This is not just a matter of generating revenue: it is an indicator of social solidarity and therefore should be seen as part of an overall citizenship package. I was always in favour of a hypothecated tax for the top 1 per cent of earners, linked to child poverty. Why should not the super-rich support the super-poor? No one seems to have taken up the suggestion.

Thirdly, we should consider wealth taxes. There are problems with the mansion tax, but countries like Switzerland have progressive wealth taxes. They work reasonably well at a cantonal level. We should consider progressive wealth taxes on all assets, not just on property. I strongly agree with the noble Lord, Lord McNally, that you must have strategic and effective action on the international level. The closing down of tax havens remains a very important prospective task, and I ask the Minister to comment on how far he thinks that we have got with that. Finally, we know that our society is too unequal for its social health and solidarity. The aim of political policy should be to reduce inequalities. It can and should be done.

My Lords, any debate on making the tax system fairer and more progressive must extend to local taxation, where failure to meet these criteria applies in spades. In one of the most centralised countries in Europe, on average only £350 of an estimated £7,000 per head spent by the public sector in each area is controlled by democratically elected councillors. That may be a point for the debate on constitutional reform that will follow. What is certainly for this debate is the high degree—75 per cent—to which local government is dependent on central government grants for its revenue.

If you believe in representative democracy at local level, that matters; we on these Benches believe that it matters. Among the very many sharing the view is the CLG Select Committee in the Commons, which stated last May in its report, The Balance of Power: Central and Local Government, that:

“The Government should consider options to increase local government's revenue raising powers, in order to promote local accountability and encourage local government autonomy”.

This was in particular to encourage local government to be more proactive—there is real concern that after so many years of central control the legacy is too much a culture of assuming that a council does not have the freedom to innovate and to respond to its particular circumstances.

The Select Committee had previously identified from the evidence guiding principles with which it would be hard to take issue: equity, simplicity, flexibility, transparency and accountability. I do not think that anyone could argue that the council tax or business rates set by and collected on behalf of central government—although, oddly, it is only business rate payers who have statutorily to be consulted on the local budget—meet the criteria. The committee argues that this needs to stay in the “too difficult” tray.

The 75 per cent figure is not uniform in my own borough. Forty-seven per cent, almost half of revenue, comes from the council tax; 12 per cent comes from grant—based on an opaque formula; and more than 40 per cent from the dedicated schools grant. You might think that the 47 per cent figure moves closer to connecting the taxpayer with the relevant sphere of government and improves the link between citizens and their council. However, you should try to explain, as I had to do over the years as a councillor, to people living in council accommodation how it is that they pay more council tax than people living in the large, now privately owned council houses on the other side of the road.

The “why?” is even harder. It cuts little ice to say that your borough receives the lowest amount per head from central government but manages to provide jolly good services for the lowest spend per head. If you are really ambitious, try explaining gearing: that to spend another pound, you have to increase council tax by £7. We should not be surprised by the strength of feeling against council tax and the resistance to it from people on low incomes, particularly pensioners who feel no connection with it and see no value in it.

I was struck by the Select Committee’s comment that local authorities in Denmark and Sweden—I do not know whether Finland comes into this category, too; I am not sure that it looked at it—which raise 70 per cent of their own revenue, look outwards to their own communities and are much less fixated on their relationship with central government.

Local income tax, which Liberal Democrats have long advocated, would by definition be better related to people’s ability to pay. It is no surprise that its supporters stretch over the inquiries. Layfield and Lyons parted company over the sequencing, not over the substance.

The Government respond defensively to such arguments. Yes, they have reduced some ring-fenced funding, but a great deal of it is still tightly designated. Schools funding is structured in such a way that it has moved education a long way towards being a national rather a local service. Pointing, as government have done recently, to local government’s scope to levy fees and charges is not the point. The Government said that parking charges were an example. Does no one in CLG read newspapers or watch the local news? Protests about parking charges feature very regularly, particularly the suspicion that the local authority is charging for parking to pay for other services.

The Government, in a context where the poorest 20 per cent of households pay three times as much in council tax as a proportion of their income as the richest 20 per cent, are unlikely to concede those arguments, or to rush to embrace another idea which, although directly about taxation, is certainly not unrelated. The Select Committee that I mentioned proposed that a Joint Committee of both Houses to monitor government compliance with the constitutional settlement between the spheres of government would,

“provide further impetus to creating and sustaining a pendulum swing in the balance of power between central and local government … To assist the Joint Committee … similar to the provisions under the Human Rights Act, government departments would need to confirm on the front of domestic bills that they complied with the local government statute”,

and would have to give an impact assessment. The report said:

“Professor Tony Travers suggested that such a committee could examine and report on issues such as: the impact of legislation on local government autonomy; the use of regulations and other directions to intervene in local decision-making”—

and they do, at the moment—

“the operation and limitation of local taxation”,

and,

“the impact of central funding mechanisms”—

a good idea, but not a new one.

The Select Committee of this House on relations between central and local government proposed in 1996 that a permanent parliamentary committee should be established to maintain an overview of central/local relations, which would provide accountability and an established forum for scrutiny and an easier mechanism for promoting public debate. The Government in 1996—note the date—were fairly dismissive. I served on that Select Committee, as did my noble friend Lord Tope, who tells me that he recently came across a speech that he made in the following year on that committee’s report, and said that he could make it again now after 13 years of a Labour Government, almost word for word.

Council tax is an unfair tax. It was unfair under a Conservative Government and it is unfair under Labour. I have the view, as has been aired, of tax being a good thing in a representative democracy, for reasons that I hope many of your Lordships share. If the tax levied is unfair, those elected are hugely hampered and, worse, those whom they represented are hampered in assessing their representatives, and democracy itself is damaged.

My Lords, I feel a very lonely voice from these Benches or upper yards, lonely but unbowed. I have great respect for the noble Lord, Lord McNally, but, as he is leaving as I am about to pay him a compliment, I shall return to that later. It is a difficult scene. The Liberal Democrats are organised like a gang and hunt as a pack. They are well organised and try to sing off the same hymn sheet, but often fail. One thing they do is ask lots of questions but never give any answers. Last year we had 6,300 Questions for Written Answers, of which well over 30 per cent were asked by the Liberal Democrat party. The noble Lord, Lord Dykes, asked the most—more than 300—and cost the most, at something around £32,000. When you ask questions, you have to determine whether you are interested in getting an answer or are seeking to promote yourselves.

One thing that I have found in common with others in this debate is a strange word—“cable”. When I was an upper yardman before I became an officer, which meant that I was up on the yards, I always wanted to know what the buzz of the lower deck was. That was the cable deck. If there were real problems when you were at anchor, it was in the cable locker. I was sitting in the Peers' Guest Room, looking at the picture of the battle of St Vincent, and then determined that there were actually 33 St Vincents. Then I thought, “Well, the Liberal party has one—Vince Cable”. I would like to see him in this House, as he is a good man who presents himself well and, as with the noble Baroness, Lady Valentine, the word “cable” comes with him. Is he the sole purveyor of the Liberal Democrat economic policy? Possibly he is.

Today we have an election presentation by the Liberal Democrat party. I have a great advantage that, because of my age and having been here for so long, I have never had a vote in this country—I was disfranchised by the hereditary system. People have tried to disfranchise me completely ever since. But over the past 40 years, I have usually spoken only when things are bad; when things are good, other people want to speak, and are more important. I have spoken through every recession, and it is usually the same problem. The Government have run out of money; the people who are meant to be creating the money are not creating enough. The Government try new schemes to see whether they can get non-government money—they call them PFI projects or things like that. We all forget that we have run out of money, which is a worse situation than the South Sea bubble—it is worse than anything. A word that has disappeared from our dictionary is “trade”, which is the objective of creating added value, whether at home or abroad. Added value was one of the original reasons for Mehrwertsteuer, or value added tax—taxe sur la valeur ajoutée. That is a perfectly reasonable tax to apply, which is not standardised across Europe. Possibly the Government will think about putting it up to the same level as the French, at 19.6 per cent—but for goodness’ sake, if we have a tax, let us have it at a round figure of 20 per cent, so that people can calculate it.

Where the Government have run out of money and have borrowed to fund things, you have a very difficult situation, which other people cannot understand. First, the term “public sector” should be dropped; it should be called “government sector”. The term “private sector” should be dropped, because it is effectively the people. To assume that the public or the people are government is wrong. What the Government have done over the years is to rob us blind—but then Governments always do that. Then the situation emerges that, having run out of money, they do not know what to do. There needs to be a slightly buccaneering and piratical attitude. The first one is, “Let us rob Johnny Foreigner; he is foreign, he is rich, and we want his money”. The next one is, “Let’s see where we can take money away from people—we could have capital taxes on their houses, for example”. Instead, we could be looking at the Government’s own system and structure and say, “What can we rob from ourselves to spend on the things that the people need?”. I do not know.

I come to one of my favourite subjects, as the noble Baroness glittering on the Benches opposite will recall—non-departmental public bodies. In a few weeks, out will come the latest publication on what has been spent on these quangos or angos, or whatever they are. That is nothing against the 90,000 people employed in them, but the accountability bothers me. The accounts will come out a year and a half late and will probably show an expenditure of £43 million—I have to cough here and say, actually, that it is not £43 million but £43 billion, which is more than the defence budget and more than half the National Health Service budget. Do we really need these unaccountable bodies? You start to think about that and get worried.

Then we come to my other favourite subject of trade. As I have explained before, I have been in trade, which people used to think meant that I had to sit below the salt; I never understood why salt was such an important commodity. There is hardly a government department in which the word “trade” exists now. It is the “department of business”—but business is the sort of thing that dogs do in the early morning when you let them out. Trade is about creating the added value. As we suffer already from a balance of payments deficit on manufacturing of well over £100 billion and a devaluation of our currency of 50 per cent—more than of any other currency in the developed world over the past 200 years—if we buy anything from abroad, we buy it with a lower currency. We know that in the shops there has been a boom, because the shops bought their products with a slightly higher currency and are now selling and making a margin at a lower currency. Everyone is beating a path to our door.

I do not blame anyone for this situation, but this is a moment when your Lordships’ House, which can often be non-political, could begin to sing from the same hymn sheet. We have an election coming up and, whichever party comes to power—unfortunately I cannot give any of them my vote because I have been disfranchised—I would say to the people, “You deserve the Government you get because you voted for them”. Over the past few years, I say with much regret, we have had a Government who have failed to create any form of reasonable economic growth, although naturally they will not say that it is their fault.

I live in hope that we will soon have a situation where we wish to reform your Lordships’ House, but the House is actually a terribly cost-effective body—unless we ask too many Questions for Written Answer.

I have a great respect for the way in which the Liberal Democrats in this House have got their act together. I know that they are seeking to win votes, and why shouldn’t they? I pay tribute to the noble Lord, Lord McNally, not only for this debate but for the gentlemanly manner in which he has led his party—although it is, of course, still a pack or a gang.

My Lords, I thank the noble Lord, Lord Selsdon, for his tributes to the Liberal Democrats and to the questions that we ask; it is the Opposition’s role to ask questions of Government.

A 0.1 per cent rise in economic growth is obviously better than none at all, but it undoubtedly means that everything must be done to nudge forward and sustain recovery. When it comes to business, and to small business in particular, the weight of the burdens placed upon them has a crucial impact. It has been suggested that the total administrative burden placed on business by the UK tax system is approximately £5.1 billion a year, although it may even be more. That is why fair tax and simplification of tax is so important.

The strength of our business sector is vital, not just for the headline figures but to ensure the provision of jobs and the reduction of unemployment. In response to this, our Liberal Democrat tax plans place great emphasis on simplicity. Tax policies should be clear to taxpayers, and our aim is to eliminate complexity in existing legislation. To quote the FSB, the recovery,

“will require a sympathetic tax regime”,

particularly for small firms, which contribute more than 50 per cent of UK turnover.

On top of that, says the FSB, there is another need:

“a stable and predictable business environment”.

I say to this Government, and equally to the previous Conservative Government, business needs stability and certainty. Tax policies must not be retrospective and should provide the taxpayer with certainty over correct treatment.

The complexity of the current system allows some businesses to exploit the system and use loopholes to avoid tax, as has been referred to, while for small businesses the tax system actually requires expensive professional support in order to meet minimum requirements. Overall, the complexity leads to some small businesses failing to meet their tax obligations. For example, many people who are just entering self-employment have been fined for failing to register as self-employed quickly enough. In 2009, over 23,000 people were fined for registering late. Equally, in 2008 HMRC issued over 400,000 fines for late payment of VAT. Tax reliefs, allowable expenses and capital allowances are not widely understood or used by small businesses. The emphasis that we would place on simplicity is important, as well as a sympathetic tax regime.

We need to listen to small businesses. For example, the Federation of Small Businesses suggests the removal of the penalties for late registration as self-employed. As the FSB says, the first few months as a small business are a busy time and many people miss this deadline without realising that it exists. Many self-employed people may not register unless they go straight to an accountant or get other advice.

On the subject of advice, HMRC’s website is a minefield. Unless you know exactly what you need, it is unlikely that you will be able to find information easily. When information is found, it is often complicated, lengthy and difficult to navigate. HMRC guidance on, for example, how to operate statutory sick pay runs to 40 pages. Added to that, tax specialists frequently complain about inaccuracies in the information that is available.

We on these Benches have made clear that we want simplification, a call that resounds throughout the country from those small businesses bearing the burden of trying to understand what they should be doing. Many of them are motivated to do the right thing, but understanding is quite a problem. Under our plans, income and capital gains, for example, would be taxed at the same rate, dramatically simplifying the tax system. We would retain incentives to invest, such as the enterprise scheme and venture capital.

The case is made for simplification, fairness and a sympathetic regime. No Government can promise an overall reduction in taxation, given the condition of the public finances, but we can make the system work more fairly. For a long time now there has been unfairness when it comes to business rates. We on these Benches would ensure that the burden of business rates was spread more equitably between small and large retailers. A figure that is often quoted is that a small shop can be paying something like 30 per cent or more of its money on business rates whereas a larger supermarket shop pays probably only 5 per cent of its money. It would be so important for our retail communities to have that addressed.

We need to ensure that people feel that there is fairness. People would see it as fair if, as the Liberal Democrats have proposed, there were a supplementary profits tax on the banks, which would also serve the important task of requiring the banks to pay a premium for the insurance, the guarantee, that the state provides against counterparty risk.

My last point for the Government is one that I have raised quite a few times. It is clear from the sort of work that we see coming forward from the Federation of Small Businesses and many other small businesses that civil servants and politicians frequently do not understand the difficulties and the complexity of running a small business. Surely it would be of great benefit if civil servants and politicians had a placement in a small business, even if only for a week or two. They would see, as a result of that, just what a struggle it is and what the difficulties are. I hope that that can be taken into account.

I hope that the Government will take heed of the message from the small business community for simplicity, certainty and efficiency from government.

My Lords, I thank the noble Lord, Lord McNally, for getting this issue on to the agenda. Whether he is making party speeches is neither here nor there; this is a subject of profound difficulty and importance to the country.

I declare a couple of historical personal interests: I was in the Inland Revenue for about 20 years, and for about 30 years I was in the Inland Revenue Staff Federation, ending up as general secretary. I was on the old Royal Commission on Income and Wealth—the first quango, I think, to be abolished by Mrs Thatcher, as she then was. That perhaps explains in part why we find ourselves only this week getting a pretty definitive report on what the situation is truly like in the country.

I find very little to disagree with in principle with what a number of Liberal speakers, including the noble Lord, Lord McNally, have said. My problem is with how practical some of that is to implement; I will perhaps come on to that. Although the noble Lord, Lord Goodhart, gave a very good explanation of one issue, which is NIC, in large measure he demonstrated that we are locked into the system that we have in the short term. There are limits to what we can do; the short term is actually quite long. We are talking of at least a full Parliament.

It is not just short-term in the time that it takes to think of what to do. Practical implementation is now extremely difficult. There are not only the problems of revenue, which I will come to a little later, but once you have a computer you are in real trouble. Who has not been to a meeting where two or three of us get diaries out that can tell us in minutes—or seconds—whether we can make another meeting, while she or he sitting with their computer takes a little longer to find what they are looking for?

Much has been said by a number of speakers about the economic problems of the country. My personal view is that that is now being overdone, and that we will get ourselves through this if we keep our heads. What has not been mentioned, if one looks progressively over the next decade, are the problems of growing old—and who should know better about that than us in this House? It is a real problem that we are not seriously addressing, and a very expensive one.

My belief is that we need to begin to think about a fundamental reform of our whole taxation system. John Hills, a much respected professor—the noble Lord, Lord Giddens, mentioned his report—showed some quite alarming figures. On the usual measure of inequality, if you get a lower percentage toward zero you are there, while if you get a higher percentage you are some way off it. The UK’s figure is 33 per cent; Sweden’s is 22 per cent, and Germany, Japan and France all have better figures than ours. When it came to wealth, 2 per cent of our country has none at all—indeed, some have negative wealth. The top 10 per cent have an average of £850,000; the top 1 per cent have an average of £2.6 million or more. Yet yesterday, on the 10 o’clock news, Mrs Theresa May mentioned the report but did not mention income or wealth at all. It was all the problem of Labour on the one hand, and of the need to improve education and employment on the other. She did not mention what was at the heart of the report, which is that if you have low income and low wealth, you are low in almost everything else—including all the services that we all rely on to some degree.

Looking at the history of taxation, we have not done much over the decades that has been fundamental. We abolished Schedule A on houses, which was just as well, perhaps, because the yield could look pretty handsome at today’s prices; we abolished the half-year for employed taxes and invented pay-as-you-earn; we abolished Schedule B, which was for the taxation for farmers and was beginning to look completely silly. Yet that was decades ago, and very little of a fundamental nature has been dealt with since.

People have tried; the late Iain Macleod produced a quite voluminous report, which I do not think that many people ever saw. I was able to see it because the then Chief Inspector of Taxes, Leonard Barford, showed it to me. Sadly, however, Macleod died and I suspect that we missed one of the better Chancellors of the Exchequer over the decades that followed. Anthony Barber had a go with his negative income tax proposals, but they were very quickly overturned when Nicky Calder got hold of the figures and discovered that if Lord Barber’s heart was in the right place, his figures were in fact not—because there was redistribution from the poor to the rich, rather than the other way round. The late John Smith got into real trouble for doing precisely what the Liberal Democrats have recommended, which is a much more stepped system of direct taxation. We are not going to get to that easily.

I am conscious of the time, but I believe that it is important to try to integrate tax and social security benefits. There are many distortions and there is a great lack of understanding, as others have mentioned. That is something which we should try to deal with. The other proposal that I would make is on inheritance tax, where the whole situation has, in my opinion, become completely ludicrous. It is driven by homes and houses, and the yield will probably fall very considerably if either proposal comes into effect. Colbert the economist has been mentioned; of course, historically the dead were not supposed to have any feathers, so they could not wave them about. Yet now, those who hope to inherit are all jumping about with what we have.

I would recommend exploring the concept of an accessions tax; that is to say, a tax whereby inherited money is taxed at the rate of the person who inherits it. That has one special advantage, in that it encourages people making wills to spread their generosity relatively widely, and perhaps to look at those among their families and friends who are less well off. Certainly, we would want to have some exemptions; probably, some kind of lifetime figure exemption, and we would be looking at spouses and legal partners. Yet there would be very considerable merit in doing something of that order.

However, I stress that there are great limits to what can be done with the present system. On local income tax, which the Scots wanted, I wrote to the Scottish Times about the problems. They could not do it inside five years if they wanted to. I believe that it is the case with local income tax that it is not possible or practical to do it within that time, and that would be true of many of the other changes that people want. We have to have a short-term plan—that means for at least four or five years—and we need a longer-term plan for a major reform of our taxation to fit us for the 21st century.

My Lords, I should like to speak today about young workers, one of the groups most affected by our unfair tax system. They are the people who should be paying less tax, partly because that is fair and partly to help them get a start in life.

I am particularly concerned about young workers in this time of recession, which I am not convinced is over. Young people are more in danger of being made unemployed during a recession since they have not built up large redundancy entitlements, which might deter the employer from getting rid of them. When a lot of older people have been made redundant, they will be competing for the same jobs with people who have much more experience—and, probably, self-confidence—and may have better qualifications. Even if they get a job, we take far too much from them people in the way of tax. If they are single and childless, they will not benefit from child benefit or child tax credits. Anyway, it is cheaper for the public purse to deduct less tax in the first place, through an existing system, than to set up a system to give some back.

The problems that young workers face are numerous. Looking first at their wages, the national minimum wage for workers over 22 is £5.80 per hour, but the 18 to 21 group gets only £4.83, and 16 and 17 year-olds get £3.57. Of course, those aged up to 18 are also going to have to spend a day a week training in the near future, so their earning time will be reduced. I do not, of course, disapprove of young people training but the fact remains that they will be taking less money home. Currently, the average pay of a working 16 year-old is just over £10,000 per year; it is £14,327 for 18 to 21 year-olds; and £23,502 for those aged between 22 and 29. All that is against the national average of £31,916.

You might think that £10,000 is a lot of money for a 16 year-old living at home, even though they will have to pay tax and national insurance out of it, with travel costs, lunches and, possibly, working clothes as well. But what about those who are not living at home, or whose parents cannot or will not pay for their clothes, food and leisure?

One of the major costs people face these days is housing. There is of course not enough housing available from social housing providers, and the average rents from private landlords are unaffordable for a young person. You have to pay an average of £198 a week in London, with a spread across the country down to the lowest average of £91 a week in the north-east and west. No wonder the Joseph Rowntree Foundation tells us that at least 75,000 young people experienced homelessness at some time in 2006-07. The rules for income levels qualifying for housing benefit vary from place to place but they cover only rent and service charges. They do not cover fuel costs and food. So housing is the biggest headache of all for young and low-paid workers.

Clearly, for the very youngest, purchasing their own home is completely out of reach. The average age of first-time buyers has risen from 26 in 1974 to 31 in 2004, and is 30 now. The average age of those buying without any help from family and friends has risen from 33 in late 2007 to 36 today. It is not hard to see why. The average price of a first-time buyer's property in the third quarter of 2009 was £134,266, and they needed a deposit of more than £33,000. This varies very much across the country. The average in London was £222,000 with a 20 per cent deposit, which is more than £40,000. The cheapest was Scotland with an average price of £93,000 with a 17 per cent deposit. What on earth are we thinking? How can young people possibly afford that?

Crucially, in London the average first-time buyer’s price gets close to the £250,000 threshold for stamp duty, so there are likely to be some who hit it. As other noble Lords may have done, I received a briefing from the Royal Institution of Chartered Surveyors, which believes that the current slab structure for stamp duty distorts the market, disadvantages first-time buyers and older people seeking to downsize. The RICS advocates reform towards a marginal system like income tax, where the higher rates would be paid only on the slice above the threshold. It believes that stamp duty should not be charged for first-time buyers and older people downsizing their homes, an idea which has a great deal to recommend it. It is an unfair tax. At this time of unemployment it restricts people’s ability to chase jobs across the country and take their families with them. Are the Government considering these changes, which could be achieved without reducing the total tax take? It would be undesirable if a lot of breadwinners had to get a job in another city and live alone, leaving their families behind. That will do nothing for family stability, which is so desirable in our society.

The problems of young workers get even more complicated if the young person has decided to stay on in education and go to university or college, with the matter of student debt rearing its head. Up to 2007, the average student debt was between £8,000 and £12,000. The April after the graduate reaches an income of £15,000 per year, he has to start paying off that debt. I tried to find out how many of them cannot afford it. Many do not get to that point for years and the interest, of course, then builds up. A report published in 2008 by the 1994 Group showed that about 11 per cent of young people who graduated in 2002-03 earned less than £15,000 three and a half years later, and so had not started paying off their student debt. A third of them earned less than £20,000 per year, so they did have to pay but found it very difficult. Although I agree with the premise that, on average, you earn more over a lifetime if you have a degree, it can be very hard to get going, even for the well qualified. I heard only yesterday of a young man with an MSc who cannot get a job. We are of course hearing that student debt is likely to climb to an average of £20,000 over the next few years, so the situation will be a lot worse.

These are the problems faced by young workers, however industrious, however keen, and however bright. What are we doing taking a higher percentage of earnings from them than is paid by the directors of the companies for which they work? It really is an unfair system where we take income tax from people earning as little as £10,000. I commend Vince Cable's proposals to the House as being a great deal fairer for young workers and all other low-paid people. I say to the noble Lord, Lord Selsdon, that the country has asked questions in these turbulent times, and St Vincent of Cable has given sensible answers, which I am sure will be popular with the electorate in the coming months.

My Lords, the issue which first got me interested in politics as a teenager was that of fairness—or rather, how to reduce what I thought were many unfair aspects of society. My motivation was essentially a moral one, although that certainly was not how I would have expressed it at the time. What is clear now, however, is that inequality is not just about a moral sense of what is right and wrong—although it certainly is that—but there is now growing acceptance that unequal societies also lead to a range of undesirable social outcomes.

In a remarkable new book by academics Richard Wilkinson and Kate Pickett, called The Spirit Level, they demonstrate, by comparing data across a wide range of developed countries, that more unequal societies suffer from greater social problems. These include life expectancy, infant mortality, obesity, mental illness—including drug and alcohol dependence—teenage births, homicides, imprisonment rates, social mobility, level of trust and the status of women. Some of these are rather surprising, but they are all strongly supported by the evidence. The list demonstrates that while we may want and need, as a society, to take action to tackle each of those problems separately, the best way to tackle them all simultaneously is to promote greater equality.

Promoting equality is not, of course, just about taxation, or even the combined contribution of tax and spend. It also has a lot to do with business ethos, which is why we have been so critical in recent years and months not only about the bonus culture of the banks, but about the runaway salaries of senior management in the private sector, and now, to an alarming extent, in the public sector. Who in their right minds, for example, could have thought that the unqualified head of children’s services at Doncaster Council who was in charge during the recent gruesome attempted murder case was worth a salary of £102,000? The role of taxation and public expenditure in redistributing resources is clearly going to be key to reducing inequality and the social problems that it brings.

As a number of noble Lords have pointed out, the past quarter century has seen a marked increase in income and wealth inequality in the UK. It grew most rapidly during the later Thatcher years. Despite the rhetoric and programmes such as tax credits, it has not been reversed during the Labour years. That is the principal conclusion of Sir John Hill’s report, which was published yesterday.

My Lords, I offer a correction. John Hill’s report says what I said that it said, which is that there was steeply rising inequality during the Tory Government but, since the advent of the Labour Government, there has been a stabilisation. Inequality has not continued to increase as measured by the Gini coefficient or other measures of inequality.

The noble Lord clearly was not listening. I said that it has not been reversed during the Labour years.

Particularly worrying for me is that the arguments in favour of greater equality have largely disappeared from the political debate. The recent social attitudes survey showed that support for redistribution from the better off to the less well off has dropped, with only 38 per cent saying that government should create a more equal society compared with 51 per cent 16 years ago. As John Curtice, professor of politics at Strathclyde University, commented earlier this week, new Labour has failed to make the case for equality and, as a result,

“today the public no longer believes so strongly in the importance of equality and redistribution by the government. New Labour has helped ensure that British public opinion has a more conservative character”.

How do the parties now stand on the use of taxation to reduce inequalities? The Conservatives have shown no evidence of any shift away from their traditional indifference to equality as a political and social issue. On tax, their position, to the extent that it is clear at all, moves in one direction. The few tax measures that they have announced would actually increase inequality rather than reduce it. Abolishing stamp duty on share transactions and raising the inheritance tax threshold will benefit only the already affluent. Their views on supporting marriage via the tax system are vague and shifting, but given that marriage is now relatively rare among some lower income groups, the main beneficiaries of any married person’s tax break are likely to be from the middle classes.

For the Government the position is more mixed. In many ways we support the principles behind tax credits. The problem, however, is that the implementation has been flawed and that they have been set to go far too high up the income scale. As for the 50p tax rate, the interesting thing is that Labour has not really argued in favour of that as an issue related to equality; it has been argued purely as a tax-raising measure. As my noble friend Lord Goodhart pointed out, national insurance has been raised as a proxy for raising income tax, as the ultimate stealth tax. Virtually nobody understands it, and even though they bear it, they do not feel it in the way they would with income tax.

On other issues the Government’s policy seems positively perverse. The 18 per cent capital gains tax, a reversal of the equality between capital and income taxes which the noble Lord, Lord Lawson, introduced, merely serves to encourage already well to do people to push earnings towards capital and away from income. In the early years, at least, of new Labour, a number of Ministers made high-profile expressions of support for the rich and for the idea that personal enrichment was socially valuable. That was very strange. We have tried, I hope, to be rather more consistent in our view that equality matters and that something should be done about it, although I do not think that we were totally immune from the prevailing spirit of the boom years, during which there was huge pressure on all politicians to promote any measures which would further stoke the boom.

We have sought to promote a continuous stream of small changes that, taken together, will lead towards greater equality. In terms of tax, we have argued that, leaving aside the package of tax and expenditure changes which are needed to reduce the deficit, we need a package that brings people out of tax at the bottom by a combination of what we hope are seen to be fair measures. We would abolish the higher rate relief on pension contributions. We would put capital gains tax back up to 40 per cent. We would introduce a tax on high-value property—the noble Lord, Lord Giddens, referred to that as the “mansion” tax—as the first phase of moving towards the policies of my noble friend Lady Hamwee for achieving a more sensible system of local government taxation. We would tackle loopholes via an anti-avoidance rule, as my noble friend Lord Goodhart mentioned. Furthermore, to pick up a point made by the noble Baroness, Lady Valentine, we would introduce green taxation measures. I hope that we would follow the same principles as regards cutting public expenditure or raising taxes to deal with the deficit. Certainly, in terms of measures such as the bank profits tax, which we have already announced, we feel very much that we are moving in that direction.

The collapse of the financial bubble gives us a golden opportunity to argue for a more equal society. The unfettered pursuit of personal gain has been tested to destruction. We must now develop further policies, and not just on tax and public expenditure, which promote greater equality across society as a whole. But more importantly in my view than any individual tax measure, we as politicians must argue with conviction and persistence the case for a more equal society as a good in itself and as the most effective way of tackling a range of deep-seated social problems. As we approach the election, that is exactly what we on these Benches plan to do.

My Lords, I, too, congratulate the noble Lord, Lord McNally, on choosing to focus this debate on taxation. We can tell that we are well and truly in an election period when no less than the leader of the Liberal Democrats in your Lordships’ House comes to a Thursday debate to talk about a subject that I for one have certainly not heard him talk about for as long as I have been in your Lordships’ House.

We know that the Liberal Democrats have fought elections on platforms that are largely unelectable—namely, those of shed loads of public expenditure funded by high tax rates and local income tax in particular. The big question might be whether the latest proposals that the noble Lord, Lord Newby, and others have outlined fairly represent what a Liberal Democrat Government would do, if such a thing ever came to pass, but I do not expect to find the answer to that question any time soon.

I shall start by saying that I agree with the noble Lord, Lord McNally. We completely agree that fairness should be at the core of government policy and that the tax system should be fair. I hope that the noble Lord, Lord McNally, is not too shocked by that agreement. When I researched the Liberal Democrats’ tax policies for the purposes of today’s debate, I found that they say that the principles on which they have based their latest proposals are very similar to those that you would find, for example, in the report of the Tax Reform Commission, which was chaired by my noble friend Lord Forsyth. My noble friend had his name down to speak today but then discovered that he could not be here for the winding-up speeches. Therefore, he withdrew his name this morning, which he regrets that he had to do. The Liberal Democrats and the Conservatives both use terms such as “efficiency”, “fairness”, “simplicity” and “transparency”, but I suspect that we do not endow all those terms with exactly the same meaning. We may well find that the Liberal Democrats and the Conservative Party are divided by a common language.

We are probably in the same place on simplicity. We have criticised the Government for the excessive complication of the tax system. As a result of the Government’s policies towards the tax system over the past 13 years, we now have the longest fiscal code in the world, which is not an achievement to be proud of. We have explored this in many debates and it is clear that the Government do not even get to first base on understanding that simplification requires a completely different mindset. My own party has a policy that is based on a study done by my noble and learned friend Lord Howe of Aberavon and we intend to create an office of tax simplification in order to tackle this, as well as ensuring that Finance Bill clauses get proper technical scrutiny, including the involvement of your Lordships’ House.

The area in which we will probably find differences between these Benches, the Liberal Democrat Benches and, indeed, the Labour Benches is what we mean by fairness. We have heard today that both the Labour Party and the Liberal Democrats favour progressive taxes which they think are fair. We do not oppose progression in our tax system but we believe that there are limits on the amount that the state should raise in taxes to spend as public expenditure. We do not see taxpayers at the higher end of the income spectrum as resources with capacity to pay ever rising amounts of tax to fund ever higher expenditure. We certainly do not believe in redistribution for its own sake. For us, fairness is about protecting those most in need at the bottom end of the income distribution rather than levelling down from the top. We do not believe that progression is a virtue in its own right. Conservatives have a long tradition of espousing low taxes and low tax rates. We remain at heart a party that aspires to low tax rates. That inevitably reduces the scope for progression.

My honourable friend Mr George Osborne has said that we will need to retain the 50 per cent tax rate due to be introduced this year by the Government, because—I use my noble friend Lord Selsdon’s phrase—the country has “run out of money”. We have also said that we could not think of reducing the top rate of tax while we impose a pay freeze on public sector workers, but noble Lords should be in no doubt that it grieves us mightily that the Government have so mismanaged the economy that we have been forced into these high tax rates that they are about to inflict. We have the same approach to the withdrawal of personal allowances above income levels of £100,000, because, in particular, that involves marginal tax rates of up to 67 per cent.

High marginal tax rates are already a great problem of the current tax and benefit system. This affects the poor even more than the rich. Under this Government, the number of people experiencing marginal rates of more than 80 per cent has reduced a little, but there are still 340,000 people in that category. Next year, the Government estimate that 2.3 million people will have marginal tax rates of more than 60 per cent—an increase of nearly 50 per cent since the Government got their hands on our tax system. Most of those will be people on benefits or tax credits, for whom the incentives to work simply do not exist. High withdrawal rates are near relatives of high rates of taxation and progression and they are certainly not fair.

We know that the Liberal Democrats support the Government on these higher taxes and, indeed, would go even further, as the noble Lord, Lord Newby, reminded us, by reducing tax relief on pension contributions. If we are allowed to form the next Government, I do not know when we would be able to move in the opposite direction, but we firmly believe that it is in our interests to do so—the interests of our whole country—once the damage inflicted by the Labour Party on our economy has been put right.

We believe that our approach is entirely fair, because the citizens of our country will benefit from a tax system that encourages enterprise and wealth creation. Jobs will not be created from redistribution; they will come only if we have an economy that rewards success and encourages people and investment to be based here, as the noble Baroness, Lady Valentine, reminded us. We need a tax system that supports that.

My noble friend Lord Lawson showed with his tax-cutting 1987 Budget that you can combine lower tax rates with higher tax yields. That can only benefit the country as a whole. The 1987 tax changes complemented the other economic and fiscal polices of the Government, which made the UK a very attractive place for businesses to set up and operate. One of the Liberal Democrat principles is the competitiveness of the tax system, which we completely support. However, I say to the noble Lord, Lord McNally, that a tax system with marginal rates that vie for top position among the developed countries is not competitive.

One element of the Liberal Democrats’ tax policy is close to the hearts of many in my party. In 2001, my noble friend Lord Saatchi wrote a pamphlet called Poor People! Stop Paying Tax, in which he advocated a personal allowance of £10,000, so that people in lower income brackets did not pay tax only to have it handed back to them in benefits or tax credits. This was clearly the inspiration for the Liberal Democrats’ tax policy and we are mightily impressed that they have taken to heart my noble friend’s recommendations.

The noble Lord, Lord McNally, dared me to talk about marriage and taxation. He said that he had calculated that our policy would affect only 6 per cent of people. I have no idea how he arrived at that figure. While we have said that we intend to recognise marriage—we would do that during our first Parliament, once the economic position is clearer—we have not said how we will do that. It is perhaps better to have a debate on that when matters are clearer. I cannot bring myself to mention the Liberal Democrats’ proposals on a mansions tax or a capital gains tax.

I conclude by saying that we have focused today’s debate on direct, not indirect, taxes. Indirect taxes are regressive rather than progressive and bear much more heavily on lower-income groups. Perhaps we have heard little from the Liberal Democrat Benches on this issue because by far the largest indirect tax money-raiser is VAT, which of course was invented in Europe. For all the Liberal Democrats’ adherence to progressive tax systems, I expect that they, too, believe that taxing drinkers, smokers and drivers is justified by higher principles. At the very least, that demonstrates that the words “fairer” and “progressive” in the title of our debate are capable of very many interpretations.

My Lords, this have been a most interesting and fascinating debate. I am not quite sure whether the noble Lord, Lord Selsdon, managed to get out his compliment to the leader of the Liberal Party, but I will be critical of the leader of the Liberal Party, although not for his opening speech, which was beautifully composed and presented and which covered the maximum amount of generality with a limited amount of detail. My criticism is this: the title of this debate calls attention to,

“the case for a fairer and more progressive tax system”.

Given, as the noble Lord indicated, that this is possibly the last occasion on which the Liberal Party has the chance to discuss such an important issue as the economy, particularly this dimension of the economy, how is it that his party thinks that the debate should revolve around the tax system and not cover the benefits position at all? The noble Lord will obviously understand that, far from accepting his point that we are delightfully vague about what we are going to do, I refer, in responding on behalf of the Government, to that famous saying: why look in the crystal ball when you can read the book? We stand on our record on these issues.

On the question of redistribution, the record is bound to include not just taxation but benefits. We have taken half a million children out of poverty and increased resources for the most poorly paid members of our society and those with the fewest resources through our extensive benefits changes and the introduction of tax credits. It is not just a matter of taxation, not least because, as the noble Lord will appreciate, when one is discussing income tax, the impact on those with the lowest income in our society is very limited indeed. I was grateful to my noble friend Lord Christopher, with his vast experience of these issues, for making that point forcefully. My noble friend Lord Giddens also contributed in those terms. They were eager to establish that the Government’s efforts on redistribution must take in benefits as well as taxation. Yet the perspective in most representations from the Liberal Democrat Benches ignored those factors.

I emphasise this issue with regard to income inequality also. After all, the noble Lord, Lord Goodhart, and, to be fair, the noble Lord, Lord McNally, as well as other noble colleagues, emphasised that aspects of inequality in our society are an issue that a Government should address as a matter of principle. Of course the Labour Government agree with that. We emphasise that, when we came to power in 1997, we had witnessed, as a legacy of the two decades in which the Conservative Party had been in power, the most significant growth in inequality of any advanced society. The noble Baroness makes no bones about the fact that she does not look on the tax system as having anything to do with redistribution, so we know and understand exactly where the Conservative Party comes from on those matters.

My noble friend Lord Giddens emphasised the fact that, against the background of two decades of a significant move towards inequality in our society, our Government in one decade have stopped that trend—although not in its tracks, because this is an express that takes some stopping. Two decades of those policies produced levels of inequality that are enormously difficult to counteract. The Government are proud of the extent to which they have been able to deal with the issue for the least well-off in society, but we recognise that the process of creating a fairer society, though an important objective, is very difficult, given the obvious constraints that we have identified.

Talking of constraints, I listened carefully to the proposals from the Liberal Democrat Benches. I say “proposals”, but they were largely criticisms of what currently obtains in the tax structure without too much clarification of what the Liberal Democrats would put in its place. I make the most obvious point: we defend the council tax system. We do not regard it as perfectly modulated so far as concerns ability to pay, but a substantial dimension of it relates to the ownership of property and the ability to pay. I noted that the noble Baroness, Lady Hamwee, was critical of the council tax system. However, apart from the enormous practical difficulties of introducing a local income tax, we know that public opinion of it is such that it scarcely rates as a viable alternative. That is why I do not think that the Government should be challenged about the way in which they deal with local taxation. I give way to the noble Baroness.

My Lords, I cannot resist. Does the noble Lord defend the property-related aspects of council tax when the banding is so out of date and so irrelevant? Does he not pay tribute to my honourable friend Vince Cable for proposing a tax—the so-called mansion tax, which I do not think is a particularly good term—and then for being brave enough to listen to comments about it and to modify the proposals, which I think are now gathering considerable support?

The noble Baroness may contend that, but it will probably be tested in the not-too-distant future. The Liberal Democrat Benches suggest that a lot will be concealed in the debate before the nation. However, I have a different view: I think that general elections are entirely healthy in that respect. Due to the sheer level of media challenge and penetration today and the clashes between all the significant contestants in the election, all these points will be examined closely. I do not think that the Labour Party and a Labour Government defending their record will have too much difficulty in refuting the position put forward by the Liberal Democrats.

One important point put forward by the noble Lord, Lord McNally—I accept that this is an issue of considerable public interest—concerned bank bonuses. I emphasise that this is not a question of income tax. The Government attach great importance to the pay practices that have contributed to the excessive risks taken by banks, which have led us into the economic difficulties of the past two decades. We are concerned to ensure that the banks are challenged. That will be done through a payroll tax, which will be paid by the banks. The employees will continue to pay income tax and national insurance as normal, but banks will face a payroll tax if they engage in strategies for pay that we—and, I think, the nation—are not prepared to countenance as a result of the experience of the past two years.

I was grateful to my noble friend Lord Howarth for introducing a constructive dimension into the debate on the subject of support for charities. We are continuing to explore how best to help the third sector through gift aid. I know that my noble friend has been working hard in this area and we are grateful to him for that. The Government commissioned research, published only a month ago, on these issues and we are considering the findings in discussion with the sector. I have no doubt that a great deal can emerge from this process. My noble friend is right to identify certain aspects of the university sector, particularly university museums and art galleries, which can benefit from an examination of this issue.

The noble Baroness, Lady Valentine, as usual, identified the issues that concern London. We all know of her sterling work in advancing the interests of London business. With regard to tax, we start from a very competitive position. We all recognise the strains that we will be going through as we meet the problems of the deficit, but we should not underestimate the extent to which other large economies will also face those strains. The idea that at present the German economy, for example, is a picture of rosy optimism is a complete misjudgment of the position. Our international competitors will be facing these issues as well, but we start with a tax system that compares favourably with many others, as I hope the noble Baroness will recognise.

Apart from congratulating the leader of the Liberal Democrats, the noble Lord, Lord Selsdon, emphasised the importance of trade. He will know that the forecasts over the coming year for the expansion of world trade are significant and that the United Kingdom is well placed in these terms. He also talked about the depreciation of the currency, but that gives the United Kingdom some advantages. It is up to our producers and companies to take advantage of what, after two years of significant decline, will clearly be a recovery in trade.

On the question of fairness, my noble friend Lord Giddens also mentioned tax havens and the boltholes into which those with significant resources can place their resources to minimise tax. I emphasise that, during the presidency of the G20 over which my right honourable friend the Prime Minister presided, we saw a step change in international efforts to tackle tax havens and evasions. The drive from the European Community is very strong in this respect. We are part of that international drive and it is something in which the United States is also interested. A new, tough approach to offshore tax evasion, more robust penalties for non-disclosure of income and a requirement to notify the Revenue of overseas bank accounts in certain jurisdictions are all part of our programme. We are also consulting on potential changes to information requirements for non-resident trusts. Legislation will be brought forward to ensure that those who fail to declare offshore tax liabilities, attracted by deliberate tax evasion, face tough penalties. In the future, offshore evaders could face penalties of up to 200 per cent of the tax due. That is an earnest of intent. In straitened and difficult times, it is necessary that all those who control resources in the United Kingdom and who depend on business in United Kingdom, including the contribution of fellow workers, should pay their proper amount of tax.

The noble Lord, Lord Cotter, concentrated more on smaller businesses as regards taxation. The World Bank perspective is that the United Kingdom compares favourably on the ease of paying taxes. I know that the noble Lord, Lord Cotter, indicated how difficult it is, but I do not know anyone who pays taxes who does not think that it is difficult, simply because they have to make a contribution to the Exchequer. We should bear in mind the position identified by my noble friend Lord Giddens, which is that the rate of tax paying is up. That contributes to a good and stable society, from which we all benefit. We derive a significant amount of public good from taxation.

On our tax measures, the noble Baroness was kind enough to give us only a glancing blow when she talked about the size of the material that needs to be identified with regard to our taxation system. The judgment of the World Bank is that the United Kingdom compares well with other major countries as regards the ease with which taxation demands are complied with. There is always a case for tax simplification. However, the noble Lord, Lord Cotter, will appreciate that although it is an easy phrase to conjure up—after all, the noble Baroness, Lady Noakes, committed any future Conservative Government to tax simplification at an unspecified date—it is easier said than done.

My Lords, does the Minister not acknowledge the widespread criticism of clarity on taxation through HMRC’s website? Many people alluded to that and I think that clarity and explanation are much desired by business.

My Lords, I accept that point. I emphasise that the Revenue is strenuous in its attempts to make things clear. It will be appreciated that, at present, the Revenue is a good deal more open and friendly in its relationships with taxpayers than it was a decade or two ago. I accept that there is always room for improvement.

The noble Baroness, Lady Walmsley, talked about jobs and the position facing young people. I have great sympathy with the broad point being put forward, which is that we do not want young people, particularly those starting out on their careers, disproportionately to pay the price of our economic difficulties. That would blight the early stages of individuals’ careers, whether going into higher education or into youth jobs; it would be unfair to them and would be likely to stain their position for a considerable period. That is why we have committed ourselves to a guaranteed job, work experience or training for all 18 to 24 year-olds claiming jobseeker’s allowance and we shall ensure that access will be mandatory from 10 months into the claim. We are addressing that issue. The noble Baroness spoke of it in terms of objectives, to which we entirely subscribe. I have no doubt that the Government’s strategy on this will bear fruit.

The noble Lord, Lord Newby, emphasised the issues of inequality. I hope that he will think that I have addressed that. I shall make a few more comments, because he will be all too well aware that, when he talks the language of redistribution and difficult choices, no one speaking on behalf of the Government will be bested on that. I emphasise the issues on benefits and other measures, because not only is the achievement or record of the past decade reversing the trend towards greater inequality that obtained in the 1980s and early 1990s under the previous Government, but we also had a plethora of policies in regard to that. There was not just the question of tax policy, which my noble friend Lord Giddens hinted at, but real achievements in other areas as well.

One should not underestimate the significance of the national minimum wage as regards being fair to the less well-off in our society. We should not brush that aside—far from it. We should recognise the achievement of working families tax credits. I accept the point made by the noble Lord, Lord Newby, that for a couple of years there were real difficulties while we were getting tax credits right. The system is complex, but it is now bringing real benefits to people. The introduction of the new tax credits in 2003 has substantially extended the system so that we have an infinitely fairer society than the one for which we took responsibility when we came to power in 1997. Household survey data show that living standards for the poorest 20 per cent of households have risen by 15 per cent a year in real terms since 1997-98, which contrasts sharply with the period in the 1980s and 1990s when living standards of the poorest 20 per cent of households rose by less than 1 per cent a year, while those of the richest households rose by 2.5 per cent.

We are confident in our response to these proposals on tax policy. I say, as a last riposte to the noble Lord, Lord McNally, who said that this will not be an open debate, that he knows that I am speaking against a background of government policies that have been clear in the past. We had the Pre-Budget Statement just before Christmas and there will be a Budget before the general election. If he thinks that that Budget will be anything other than an opportunity for engaging in debate with the nation and identifying our priorities, he has forgotten the time when he observed the other place rather more closely. I know that our debates on the Budget are necessarily more limited, but he will recognise that the Budget will be a very significant event in the debates before the general election, whenever it comes. Therefore, on the question of openness, the Government are proud of their policy and clear about what they are presenting to the nation.

My Lords, it is always a great pleasure to listen to the noble Lord, Lord Davies. He takes me back to my youth when there was a particularly eloquent local politician in Lancashire of whom they said, “He could plait sawdust”. That is what the Minister has been doing for the past 20 minutes, along with using that favourite standby of debaters in a corner, when he argued that he would have much preferred to debate a different Motion from the one before the House. Nevertheless, the speech was good.

I am pleased that the noble Baroness, Lady Noakes, clarified the situation about the noble Lord, Lord Forsyth. I was genuinely sorry that he did not take part in the debate. I noticed that he paid us the courtesy of sitting through a good deal of the debate. Not having a speech from the noble Lord, Lord Forsyth, is not quite “Hamlet” without the prince, but more “Othello” without Iago.

In that spirit, let me say that we have had an excellent debate today, with some really thoughtful contributions. As the House may have gathered, the Liberal Democrats are very confident about the case that we will put to the country. This has been like an out-of-town production before the show moves to the West End. One thought that came to my mind is that, given all this openness and willingness to debate, and as we have broken the mould by arranging a televised debate between the three party leaders, what better than a televised debate between Vince Cable, George Osborne and Mr Darling? That would interest the country as well and would enable it to hear about some of the issues that have been debated today. In the mean time, I thank all those who have contributed. They have done so in just the kind of non-partisan way that we on these Benches intended when we tabled the Motion, which I beg leave to withdraw.

To call attention to the case for further political and constitutional reform; and to move for papers.

In moving this Motion, I anticipate that the gratifying number and distinction of those who are to contribute is a general recognition that we face a crisis of public confidence—in politics, yes, but also in Parliament in particular. During 2009, the House of Commons was, of course, very hard hit by a series of scandals—both alleged and, to some extent, confirmed. However, as they were the result of a relatively small number of behaviour problems, combined with the inadequacy of the system, it may be felt that that was all rather unfair. If it was unfair, it is still a fact.

However, the challenge for us in your Lordships’ House is threefold. It is, first, not to accept the temptation to think that it is simply the other end of the building— the Commons—that is the problem. That would be complacent myopia. To coin a phrase, we are all in this together. It is, secondly, to respond not by chiding the media, but by challenging the culture and the way that we work at both ends of the building. Thirdly, we must make sure that Parliament is more responsive to the public, whom we all serve. We have to show that our House—and the other House—is working more effectively for the electorate as a whole.

Obviously, financial probity is a start, but it will not do on its own to restore confidence. We must show that we are more effective at doing our job: representing the country at large and holding the Government to account. This House prides itself on securing useful, constructive amendments to government Bills. It is right to do so, but the Executive still run roughshod over the settled will of Parliament.

Let me take one example with which I have been concerned: the Political Parties and Elections Act. On 15 June last year, your Lordships added a new clause to the Bill. It was tabled by the noble Lord, Lord Campbell-Savours, with my support. Incidentally, he told me that he would have liked to have participated in this debate, but family commitments have made that impossible. The clause, which sought to end offshore bankrolling of political parties, was passed by your Lordships' House, despite an unholy alliance of the Conservative and Labour Whips. The Lord Chancellor, Jack Straw, reluctantly accepted the measure, as he could never have persuaded his Labour colleagues to vote in favour of a tide of foreign Tory cash. However, immediately after the clause was refined by the Government’s parliamentary counsel and the Bill was passed into law, the Ministry of Justice announced that it would not be implemented until after the general election.

The Government seem so bound up with their own demise that they are fated actually to accelerate it. Now, at the 59th minute of the 11th hour, Jack Straw appears to have noticed and regretted this folly. In the Independent newspaper, he published an article entitled,

“The Tories are trying to buy the election. Never before in the history of our elections has a party spent so much to help so few”.

A revelation! I cannot see how that could come as news to the Lord Chancellor, as many of us—and, indeed, many of his own party—have been telling him that that was going to be the case. The vagaries of our electoral system may be so further exacerbated by the most ruthlessly targeted campaign in the history of British elections that we will see a distorted outcome. Whole swathes of seats will be ignored as respectively “safe” and “no hope”, while the remainder—about 150 marginals—will be deluged with leaflets, direct mail, telephone calls, billboards; you name it.

More constituencies are in the process of being bought than at any time since the removal of the rotten boroughs in 1832. If any Members of your Lordships' House think that I am exaggerating, read the article in the Times today that shows that to be the case. The election will focus on a narrow band of voters in those seats, leaving millions of others in a democratic desert.

Your Lordships' House voted to stop the rot, but the Government have simply ignored the will of Parliament. Their excuses cut no ice. The Electoral Commission did not say that it would be impossible to police the safeguards against foreign donations, if Mr Straw had authorised their introduction as soon as the Bill became law. Indeed, the Government could and should have gone further, by accepting constructive proposals put forward by those of us on these Benches and others to restrict both the huge donations to central parties and the huge expenditure in marginal seats.

Ministers’ pursuit of some elusive consensus has in practice meant that the slowest reformers, the retrograde, have had a practical veto. The pace of progress has been as swift as only the most sluggish of drivers. Despite support for proper donation caps and for limits on spending in constituencies between elections, even from former national officers of the Conservative Party who sit on the Conservative Benches in this House, Ministers failed abysmally to respond to the challenge.

Now the Lord Chancellor has woken up from his lethargy and is complaining, but it is his fault. He has been shown to be a man of straw. The corrosive power of big money will, even more than before, dominate the coming election campaign and potentially determine its outcome. Potentially, that is corruption of our political process on a scale that will cause the expenses revelations of last year to pale into insignificance. Worse still, that is just one item in a catalogue of failures.

I have here a checklist of progress made on the Brown agenda, as set out in his first statement of purpose as Prime Minister and the subsequent Green and White Papers. On war powers, the proposed statutory right for MPs to vote disappeared. On treaty ratification, in the current Bill before the other House, the Lords has a very limited role, while Ministers retain wriggle room. No more is heard about even the very limited role that the Commons might have to approve the dissolution of Parliament, let alone a fixed-term Parliament. Recall of Parliament has gone. The promised review of royal prerogative powers has stalled. The proposal to increase the independence of the Attorney-General from the Government, as recommended by Commons Select Committee inquiries, to avoid rows such as those over Iraq and BAE advice, has been dropped completely. The disclosures at the Chilcot inquiry this very week show all too clearly that the office is too susceptible to political pressure, but that reform has gone.

On accountability of Ministers, regional Select Committees have been a dismal failure, while Secretaries of State are still not confirmed in office after appearing before the appropriate departmental Select Committee. The ministerial code is now not to be approved by your Lordships' House or the other place; it is still to be effectively policed only by the Prime Minister.

On enhancing the role of Back-Benchers, having set up the Wright committee with a tight timetable, the Government Chief Whip is now delaying and neutering its recommendations. Any Member of your Lordships' House who managed to observe Business Questions a couple of hours ago in the other place will have noticed that, yet again, Harriet Harman is putting this issue into the long grass. That is outrageous.

There has been absolutely no progress on petitioning Parliament. On protests around Parliament, even the modest relaxation in the Constitutional Reform and Governance Bill is being delayed by abysmally slow management by the Government. After 150 years, we thought we were getting somewhere on Civil Service reform, but the Government are now backtracking, even on important issues about the independence and integrity of the Civil Service in relation to special advisers. Reform is now at the mercy of a slow and ponderous legislative process, and there is no protection for Civil Service whistleblowers, so obviously necessary from the evidence we have seen at the Chilcot inquiry this week.

On local government, there is no sign yet of real devolution to councils or of the production of a concordat, which is not even in draft. The Equality Bill has been left so late in this Parliament that it could be lost in an early dissolution. On a British Bill of rights and duties, Ministers have vacated this territory and handed it over to reactionary Tories. As I have already said, the regulation of political party donations and expenditure has gone out of the window after the hard work across parties in the discussions on Hayden Phillips’s proposals.

Surely, constituents should have the last word on the recall of MPs. When an MP cheats, recall should not be for the party leaders, using some sort of Star Chamber process; it should be for constituents. The Prime Minister said that he was considering it, and then he conveniently forgot all about it. I dare not go into House of Lords reform. After 10 wasted years, we are getting nowhere. Some of my colleagues on these Benches will wish to say something about that.

Is there to be a deathbed repentance on electoral reform? We are told that the Cabinet was considering it this morning. Instead of a principled initiative to give electors a real choice with votes of equal value, timid ideas in the dying days of this Parliament run the risk of being seen as gerrymandering. If I may adopt a football analogy so dear to the hearts of noble Lords, I wondered this morning whether it was Newcastle Brown 2, Gordon Brown 0.

Mr Straw and the Prime Minister have said that they are in favour of a written constitution. Why not try to build up public support and encourage proper discussion among our fellow citizens in a citizens' assembly or convention to make progress? All the optimism of those early days, not just in May 1997, but in July 2007 as well, has evaporated. No wonder the public are so disillusioned and disenchanted.

However, not every reform depends on the will of Ministers. As the Lord Speaker rightly reminded us last month in her address to the Hansard Society, we could and should improve our effectiveness in holding the Government to account and raise our game. Indeed, the Hansard Society, in common with the Better Government Initiative and the Institute for Government, has been indicating ways in which we could do so. We need an urgent examination of the options along the lines suggested by the noble Lords, Lord Rooker and Lord Butler, in the debate on the gracious Speech in November. It does not need to await the general election; indeed, a clear, agreed agenda for change in your Lordships' House before the dissolution is desirable. If we leave it to the initiative of the Government Front Bench, nothing will happen, or it will be skewed to avoid improved accountability. The Conservative Front Bench, if we take the noble Lord, Lord Strathclyde, seriously—he likes to tease us sometimes—does not even seem to recognise the urgency of these reforms.

As a member of the Procedure Committee, I frankly doubt whether it is the right mechanism for this urgent project. Instead, perhaps an ad hoc committee should take forward the agenda outlined in the seminar on strengthening Parliament convened by the Lord Speaker last year. Just because the Prime Minister and the Cabinet have dragged their feet so disastrously, there is no excuse for either House to neglect its duties. To regain any public respect, so essential for our democracy to work, we need to achieve greater transparency, greater accountability and greater identification with our fellow citizens when we make decisions on their behalf at all levels of governance.

After 13 wasted years, the Government have failed to clean up our politics and make Parliament more effective. The public expect better of your Lordships' House than they do of Ministers. If we fail them again, all hope of retrieving Parliament's lost reputation will be lost for good.

My Lords, I thank the noble Lord, Lord Tyler, for securing this debate and for introducing it with considerable passion. Demands for reform in almost every aspect of our political and constitutional life are in the air and the question is how we respond to them. The noble Lord outlined a syllabus of reforms, and there are many others. We can approach and discuss these reforms in one of two ways. One way I find satisfactory, but the other I do not.

One way is to take an abstract, theoretical view of democracy, representation or this or that aspect of our public life, measure existing institutions against it, find them inadequate and criticise them. For example, we might say that democracy means election with a majority. The House of Lords is not elected; therefore, it must go or must be elected. We might say that we are a secular society; therefore, bishops have no place in the House of Lords. This is an a priori, theoretical way of approaching reform.

The second, much more empirical, pragmatic way of approaching reform is to identify problems, which institutions and practices are unjust or dysfunctional and how best we can put them right. For example, we might feel that an overbearing Executive are dominating Parliament. As a result, parliamentary debate and parliamentary control of the Executive are considerably diminished. What do we do about it? We think in terms of concrete suggestions. How did the scandal of MPs’ expenses come about? Why was it not detected for so long, and what can we do about it? In other words, we can approach every institution in terms of whether and why it is unjust or dysfunctional and what we can do about it.

It is also important to bear in mind that reform in one institution invariably has consequences for another. For example, if we try to elect the House of Lords, we run the risk that the same party might be in power in both Houses, and therefore our concern to check the overbearing Executive would be frustrated. Every reform has a knock-on effect on another and cannot be discussed in isolation from its impact. We therefore need to ask two questions: to what problem is this reform an answer, and is the reform compatible with other reforms that we also want? There is always a danger of talking about reforms in the abstract and canvassing this or that without spelling out its implications. Much as I admired the speech made by the noble Lord, Lord Tyler, I felt that many of his reforms are likely to be incompatible with each other. In this spirit, I want to look at our constitutional and political system through the lens of one question. One can look at it through the prism of the scandal about MPs’ expenses and ask how it came about and what our system looked like, but I want to look at our political system through the prism of the war in Iraq.

That war led to massive civilian and military casualties, the breakdown of law and order, sectarian violence, profound mistrust, loss of property and profound damage to our national pride and self-respect. It is a deep, massive and indelible stain on our national conscience, and the question is how we got it. When we were talking about the war in Iraq, my noble friend Lord Morgan and I wrote a letter to the Prime Minister giving seven good reasons why the war was counterproductive. We were not taken in by the arguments on WMD. Anyone who knew his history would know that that argument was untenable.

How did this happen? Why was intelligence manipulated? Why was the Cabinet bounced into supporting this decision? Why was there no planning and post-war reconstruction? Why was there no check on prime ministerial hubris or sense of self-righteousness? We will have to wait for the Chilcot inquiry report, but in anticipation of what he will say—he might not say what I suspect he will say—I end by making three important suggestions.

First, in the light of the war on Iraq and the lead-up to it, I am increasingly convinced that there should be no declaration of war without majority backing in both Houses of Parliament. In the Commons alone, there is always the danger that the party in power has a majority. Your Lordships’ House has the advantage of being free from party control.

Secondly, intelligence should be vetted and certified by an independent body of experienced statesmen drawn from all walks of life so that we can be reasonably sure that it has not been manipulated or skewed.

Thirdly, there must be some sanctions—formal or informal, legal as well as political—on those who fail to exercise proper judgment or who positively misjudge. In this context, it might be worth remembering the practice of classical Athens and Rome, where the roots of our democracy were planted. In classical Athens, those who were guilty of misjudging or who failed to exercise judgment were sent into exile. In classical Rome, they were disqualified and asked to withdraw from public life. We might have some lessons to learn from the practices of those two great societies.

My Lords, it is a pleasure to follow my former colleague at the University of Hull, the noble Lord, Lord Parekh. Like him, I wish to call attention to a particular dichotomy.

I have previously identified two types of constitutional changes: changes made to our constitutional framework and changes made within that framework. Changes made to our constitutional framework have been pronounced in recent years. They have been several and substantial. From the perspective of the constitution, they have also been incoherent: that is, they have derived from no clear view of the type of constitution deemed appropriate for the United Kingdom. Each has been justified on its individual merits and not set in a broader, intellectually coherent approach to constitutional change. We are therefore in something of a constitutional wilderness.

I have previously made the case for the creation of a commission, or a committee, on the constitution, not for the purpose of crafting a new constitution for the United Kingdom but rather for making sense of where we are and for ensuring that proposals for further change are consistent with the essential principles that underpin our constitution. Reform should not be divorced from first principles. We keep hearing about the reform of your Lordships’ House—this has already been touched on—but reform is usually couched in specific terms, focusing primarily on composition, with no reference to first principles. We need to discuss this House in the context of Parliament and what we expect of Parliament in our constitutional arrangements. Discussing composition should be the end point, not the starting point, of a discussion about Parliament’s place in our polity.

We should thus view with extreme caution calls for further major changes to the framework of the constitution. In many cases, they are contestable on their own merits. Some are lemon meringue reforms: that is, they appear superficially attractive, but when you bite into them, there is very little there. That applies not least to the arguments for electoral reform. What is more, demands for reform tend to divert us from the real, often messy, problems that face us and that permit of no clear-cut answers.

There is scope for change in our existing constitutional framework. Our system is premised on a number of vital relationships, not least between the Executive and the legislature and between the legislature and the individual. For reasons of time, I shall focus on the former.

We have seen a number of changes in recent years, which have been designed to enhance parliamentary scrutiny of legislation. Some of them have been very welcome, but Parliament, as the noble Lord, Lord Tyler, has already said, remains limited in the extent to which it can scrutinise legislation and call government to account. The Constitution Committee, in its 2004 report on Parliament and the Legislative Process, examined the process under the headings of pre-legislative scrutiny, legislative scrutiny and post-legislative scrutiny. Let me briefly identify some of the changes that we should pursue.

For pre-legislative scrutiny, the publication of Bills in draft should be the norm and not the exception. It should be a matter for Parliament as to which are then subject to pre-legislative scrutiny. Once legislation is introduced, there are changes that we should make in this House. We are in danger of being left behind by the other place. Any Bill that starts its passage in this House and that is not subject to pre-legislative scrutiny should be referred to a special Public Bill Committee or a Select Committee. We already have provision for both; we should make greater use of it. For post-legislative scrutiny, there is case for a Joint Committee to ensure that no important review is overlooked—I very much welcome the movement now for post-legislative scrutiny—and to encourage best practice in the way in which reviews are conducted.

Several other reforms could be made to strengthen Parliament in scrutinising legislation and calling government to account. The noble Lord, Lord Rooker, identified them in his splendid speech at the start of the Session; the noble Lord, Lord Tyler, has already referred to some of them. We should also review the processes by which we determine our own structures and procedures. There is a long way to go, but my point is that we can at least make progress in strengthening Parliament. Implementing reform to achieve that is both desirable and achievable. Let us focus on that, where there is a clear case to act, rather than be side-tracked by demands for wider constitutional change that detract from addressing the real issues that face this country. Let us craft the means to enable Parliament to call government to account in tackling those issues.

My Lords, first, I declare an interest. I am obviously interested in democracy—I have 15 electoral contests to my name—but, to be specific, I am chairman of the Democratic Reform Company, a director of the Joseph Rowntree Reform Trust, and a trustee of the Joseph Rowntree Charitable Trust, which has been funding the Democratic Reform Company.

Members of this House will recall the 2006 Power report, which made 30 recommendations. It was presided over by the noble Baroness, Lady Kennedy of The Shaws, and was well received—so much so, in fact, that one commentator said, “Will this splendid report just go on a shelf, or will people really take this thing seriously and take it forward?”.

The Democratic Reform Company exists to build on the Power report. Power2010 has been launched to bring the public into the heart of the issues of constitutional reform. In the early autumn, the public, via the splendour of the internet, were asked for reform ideas. Some 4,200 such ideas were received by 30 November. With the help of academics from Southampton University, the 4,200 ideas were distilled into 87 and deliberated on at an event that was held on 9 and 10 January this year. More than 130 people of all backgrounds throughout the United Kingdom were brought together by YouGov, who further considered the 87 reform ideas over two days and came up with 29 that reflected the majority of the views of the 130. All were supported by more than half the 130. This whole process was overseen by Dr James Fishkin and his team from Stanford University in the United States. Since 18 January, these 29 ideas have been put out to public vote, again via the internet, with the aim of finding the five most popular reforms. They can be found on the Power2010 website.

At 10.30 this morning, more than 25,000 votes had been cast from more than 7,500 people. Although people can vote for all 29 reforms, they are tending to vote for about three. At the moment, the leader board shows 3,900 votes for introducing a proportional voting system, 2,800 votes for scrapping ID cards and rolling back the database state, just short of 2,000 votes for a written constitution, 1,900 votes for fixed-term Parliaments, and 1,670 votes for English votes on English laws. Coming up on the rim in sixth place is a fully elected second Chamber and, in seventh, is stronger local government. Noble Lords will be interested to know that in 29th place, with only 113 votes, is directly elected mayors.

Peers are not disfranchised from this election, so everyone here can take part. This will be built up until the closure date of 22 February. It is the intention of the Democratic Reform Company to see that these top five proposals are promoted throughout the land in the ensuing months.

My Lords, I am grateful to the noble Lord, Lord Tyler, for initiating this debate and for his continued pressure on us to look at and explore issues of constitutional reform. Any such reform must combine public accountability with that effective and detailed wisdom which is necessary to explore the way forward for legislation and the testing of government action. I want to explore that briefly in terms of three points.

First, in my comparatively recent membership of this House, compared with many of your Lordships, I have been impressed, as have many others, by the quality of much debate here. We look forward to the contribution of the noble and learned Lord, Lord Carswell, particularly today, but in future as well. I have also been impressed by the willingness of your Lordships to explore alternative policies and ways of striving for justice and mercy in our legislation. Retaining that ability must be crucial to any constitutional change. It must incorporate that willingness to listen to those from a wide variety of backgrounds and professions, and take seriously debates on ethical and moral issues. We sometimes seem to live in a society where education is valued, but wisdom is not. The second Chamber in particular needs to retain that variety of experience and thought if it is to be a purposeful partner in our legislative process. I believe that that is best achieved by a fixed and significant appointed element to this House.

Secondly, if that spread of wisdom is to be achieved, we need a greater representation in this House of other Christian denominations in addition to the established role of the Church of England, to which the noble Lord, Lord Parekh, has referred. We also need greater representation of other faiths which are widely observed in this country. A good, if somewhat patchy, start has been made over a number of years. It was a privilege, for example, a few weeks ago to be present at the introduction of the noble Lord, Lord Sacks.

We rightly pay much attention to ethical and moral issues, about which there are, again rightly, sharply defined and often contradictory views. In the previous debate, it was good to hear the continued exploration of what the concept of fairness means in our society; the way in which we develop our tax system; the way in which wealth is spread around and equality is made real in our society; and the way in which that spirit of equality informs the whole of the culture in which we live.

The input of faith groups to these debates is invaluable. I hope that serious attention will be paid to how that contribution can be ensured on a wider basis than at present. I draw the attention of your Lordships to the view of the General Synod of the Church of England. It stated that members drawn from other Christian churches and other faiths should be added to the composition of a new second Chamber in our parliamentary democracy.

My third point is to advocate a change in the electoral system. I was interest to hear the latest running in the Power2010 inquiry. On looking at the voting, I was disappointed originally to see how low a change in the voting system was rated. I am delighted to see that it is growing apace as that inquiry develops. I believe that a first-past-the-past system or a closed-list system produces the appearance rather than the reality of democracy.

The Church of England has long advocated elections by single transferable vote and has used that system in its own elections since 1920. There can be many criticisms of the General Synod, some of which I hold myself. But it has demonstrated the ability to work at issues affecting the Church of England with fair representation from all sides of that church. Again, in 2003, the synod voted to encourage and enable—by legislative and administrative action, and especially by introducing proportional representation by the single transferable vote for elections to Parliament—all members of our society to play a full part in our democracy. I strongly commend STV to your Lordships as a proven system to express the democratic will and I hope that there will be a renewal of the determination to introduce it more widely in our national electoral system.

My Lords, I have had the privilege of being a Member of this House for a little over six years, but I have not until now had occasion to address your Lordships in debate. The reason is simple: I was, until my fairly recent retirement, a member of the Appellate Committee and sat as a Lord of Appeal in Ordinary. We all observed, rightly or wrongly, the self-imposed abstinence from participation in debates. But I am now released from that Trappist-type vow of silence and I hope to be able to make a modest contribution from time to time to the proceedings of the House. I trust that your Lordships will indulge me as I find my way through those proceedings.

In the context of this debate, I would echo the views expressed and the advice given by the late Lord Hailsham of St Marylebone. From time to time, proposals were advanced, which related to human rights and, as we know, in due course became the Human Rights Act 1998. But for a long time before that matured, his consistent reaction, his views and advice could be expressed in two words—be careful—which I understand he was fond of uttering. I commend those words to your Lordships as useful advice for anyone proposing constitutional change.

I am not like Lord Chancellor Eldon, who was opposed to change of any kind and the danger of anything more or anything less. One of the great advantages of our constitution is its flexibility, its adaptability, its ability to change and develop. In the process, of course, Parliament will pass legislation aimed at that result and has done so many times with many beneficial effects. If wise and constructive proposals for reform are put forward which would modernise and strengthen our long-established and well-tried constitution, I for one would have no hesitation in supporting them. I am not an opponent of change.

However, I urge caution in the process because well-intended alterations can, if the results turn out wrongly, make things worse instead of better. In this of all fields of activity, the law of unintended consequences operates with adamantine rigour and scant lack of concern for the frustrations of those who wish for something different. The Human Rights Act is a good example of the point that I wish to make to your Lordships. In saying that, I am not to be taken as either praising or criticising the Act. My point is that the consequence of the Act, unhappily, has been that a number of judicial decisions have been given which were certainly not pleasing to the Government.

Some persons in public life have been heard to say that the judges were arrogating power which they did not have and have been frustrating and stultifying the intention of Parliament. Having been in the thick of this in the judicial sphere, I reject that calumny. The judges have had the job of trying to apply legislation conscientiously and, according to my own observations and practice, they have tried to observe that as faithfully as possible. The judges’ own opinions of the legislation are irrelevant and are left out of account. They take the law as enacted by Parliament and apply it, whatever they think of it and whether they think it is good or bad. It is rather like Barry John’s famous remark when Gareth Edwards asked him how he liked his passes—high, low, fast or slow. He just looked at him and said, “You throw them, I’ll catch them”.

The consequence that the width of judicial power has been increased may have been wholly unintended but it was not sought by any judge of whose opinions I am aware. I have discussed this many times. Indeed, it was foreseen that there might be some such problems, but those who took that view were, like Cassandra, not heard or listened to. No judge to whom I have ever spoken was thirsting for the extension of power; there were no slavering judicial jaws and no longing to stick it to any Government. But there it is: the legislation was passed, the consequence happened and we have to live with it. However, it may serve as a timely warning about the difficulties of constitutional change. Think how difficult it proved to be to abolish the post of Lord Chancellor by a stroke of the pen.

I would add only one thing in conclusion: once you reduce something to writing—a Bill of rights, a constitution, things like that—you give rise to an industry among those who look for gaps, loopholes, extended interpretations and ways round. Lawyers in any other country which has a written constitution will tell you just that. My message applies right across the spectrum of constitutional change in all the aspects your Lordships are discussing today: if it is right, consider change and reform and propound it; but—in the words of Lord Hailsham—be careful.

My Lords, it is my great privilege to congratulate the noble and learned Lord, Lord Carswell, on his maiden speech. In throwing off his Trappist vows, we understand the contribution that he will make in the future to this House. In sounding out colleagues informally about the noble and learned Lord, I found that not only is he well respected in the community of Northern Ireland but he is well loved, too. That is true of the noble and learned Lord and it is equally true of his wife, Romayne, who has taken a deep part in public life in Northern Ireland. Indeed, she is Her Majesty’s Lieutenant of the City of Belfast.

The education of the noble and learned Lord, Lord Carswell, is interesting and unique. He attended the Royal Belfast Academical Institution, which I believe is known as the Inst, and was at Pembroke College and Gray’s Inn; and, to add a touch of Tabasco, he also studied at the University of Chicago Law School. Perhaps he imbibed some of the epiphany enjoyed later by President Obama. His career has been in the law. After becoming a barrister, as he has told us, he rose to become Lord Chief Justice of Northern Ireland, as well as being a Lord of Appeal in Ordinary until his recent graduation entirely here. His recreations are golf and hill walking and I hope that he will take the House of Lords as another of his recreations. He will be able to speak widely on so many issues, as well as Northern Ireland and the law, and we welcome him to the House.

The loss of the Law Lords is clearly made up for in part by the advent of the noble and learned Lord, Lord Carswell, but my thought for the day in this debate on further constitutional reform is that the Bishops should follow the Law Lords out. They are an anachronism—as were the Law Lords when they were arbitrating on laws which they had contributed to making—and there is no reserved place for religion in any other modern democracy. Indeed, the Bishops’ vote has become a block vote of 26 Bishops—as was revealed on Monday in the Equality Bill—and this is unsatisfactory. Too often the block vote of the Bishops is exercised on a narrow set of issues—sex, death, birth and other country matters. The example they set on Monday in regard to the amendments on the protection of gays in employment was not good for the Church of England. Many Anglicans prefer the Bishops to deal with real life-and-death issues—poverty; the promotion of world peace—not party politics.

Often two reasons are advanced for retaining the Bishops: tradition and history, which always seeks to modernise itself; and, secondly, their special moral insight. I saw that in Lord David Sheppard, who used to sit on these Benches, but it is not evident to me in some of their followers on the vexed moral issues of the day. For instance, on the issue of assisting the dying of the terminally ill, four out of five Protestants are for the proposal of the noble Lord, Lord Joffe.

If the Church retains these places in the House, why should it choose Bishops who are the most traditional and conservative in their views? If retained, the Appointments Commission may choose instead not people’s Peers but people’s preachers, who would be more representative of a modern Britain. Indeed, the bishops are under-representative of a modern Britain. It is still wrong that there are no women bishops—it is an affront. I have mentioned the attitude towards gay Christians. As my noble friend Lady Thornton suggested earlier this week, it really ought to be possible for reform in the Church of England to allow gay Christians to witness their civil partnerships within the churches.

Nor is the church representative of the United Kingdom. The Bank of England may operate as a whole but the Church of England is confined to England. Indeed, the Church of Scotland, interestingly, which is of course excluded, is zealous about the separation of state and religion.

The Church of England has simply not kept up with the changing times. Religious belief in Anglicanism is in full retreat; a special trend survey published this week shows that two out of five of us are now non-believers. Indeed, Prince Charles, the putative head of the Church of England, recognises the mosaic of religious aspirations; he wants to become a defender of the faiths.

Other Christian denominations and religions which have no reserved places—many would not accept them—believe that their religious freedom is curtailed by this engagement with the state. Other religions are represented by individual Members but there is no reason why that should not be the case for Anglicans after the Bishops leave.

In conclusion, this is a further reform, and I hope that it is seriously on the agenda. It would be good for the House of Lords, good for the polity of Britain, and good for the Bishops themselves.

My Lords, although I once initiated a debate in this House on the disestablishment of the Church of England, I do not propose to follow the noble Lord, Lord Harrison, in his line of thinking today. However, I want to express my sense of privilege at being present during the maiden speech of the noble and learned Lord, Lord Carswell. It was a thoughtful and a cautious speech, which will commend him to the attention of his fellows in this House.

In the short time which is available to the individuals who are speaking in this debate—and it is good to see that so many have chosen to do so—I want to confine my remarks to what I believe is an overriding issue for our constitution and for the re-establishment of confidence in our system of government as well as focusing sharply upon matters which I believe can be influenced, and can be influenced now, by our Government. We have had wide-ranging debates on political reform for the past 13 years, since the Government came to office. A number of important steps were taken early in the life of the Government, including the introduction of the Freedom of Information Act, the Human Rights Act and the devolution Acts; the first steps towards the reform of the House of Lords; and, subsequently, the separation of the House of Lords sitting in its judicial capacity and the creation of the Supreme Court. That is a remarkable record in a relatively short time.

It is partly with the awareness of the Prime Minister’s continuing expressed interest in reform that I feel emboldened to say that there are just a few months left for the Government to take forward the reform of the institutions of Parliament itself. It is central to our decision-making process; it is under attack; and, I beg to suggest to the Minister—I am very glad that he is replying to the debate—it is causing the greatest sense of public disaffection from the political process.

There is a serious risk that we shall have a very low turnout in the next general election because so many people are turned off by Parliament. There is no single silver bullet that would put this right, but some practical proposals have been made by a number of institutions. Most importantly, the Government should pay proper and full attention to the report of the committee on the reform of Parliament chaired by Mr Tony Wright. Those suggestions could be given effect now. What was said in Business Questions—which my noble friend Lord Tyler mentioned—was not entirely encouraging regarding what the Government intend to do about this. The last I heard, a debate is to take place on the Adjournment, which is not normally when you have a vote on the spectrum of issues raised by that committee. They are important propositions: they include the setting up of a business committee to ensure that Parliament—the House of Commons in particular—is devoted principally to scrutiny of the Executive and is not there just to be a rubber stamp. This most important report also proposes that the membership and chairmanship of committees should be decided by that House. I very much hope that that can be acted upon by the Government and by Parliament before the House is dissolved.

I must say that I object very strongly to the Minister sitting there and looking at his watch. I heard the Government’s proposition at the beginning of this debate that people should be allowed six minutes in which to speak. That does not mean six minutes interrupted by a sedentary Minister. I hope he will apologise for treating me in this way. The time allowed is too short; I am addressing his colleague with seriousness, and he clearly just wants to wind the clock on. I have had long experience of the noble Lord, Lord Bach, and I have no doubt that he will take that very simple point to heart. I hope that he will be able to give us some assurance that the Wright committee report will be acted upon.

My Lords, I do not believe that the cure for the ills of our democracy is more democracy. Indeed, one of the problems for the proponents of more democracy is that the people of this country do not seem to want it; when given an opportunity in a referendum to vote on whether there should be an assembly in the north-east, the people in that part of the country voted no by a large margin. The Hansard Society tells us that research shows that the public appetite for direct involvement in politics is low, and falling. You can take horses to water, but you cannot make them drink.

It is observable that discontent with politics has risen, pari passu, with the deepening of democratisation in our country over the past 40 years. During that period we have brought in referendums, devolution and varieties of proportional representation. Rights have been extended through equality legislation. We have introduced citizens’ charters and incorporated the European convention, while audit, freedom of information and the extension of choice in the public services have empowered our people vis-à-vis politics, government and public services. Polling and campaigning have become almost continuous, as has what the Wright committee refers to as the “relentless” communication of Members of Parliament with their electorate, soliciting their views and their approval.

During that period, Governments have been successful. The wealth of the nation has greatly increased and public services have greatly improved. Yet, at the same time, we have witnessed rising contempt for politics and Parliament, and falling turnout at elections. It is no consolation that the same pathology is apparent in other western countries.

Against that background, ill thought out, populist or techie reforms will not restore trust in our political system, nor do their authors any good. Certainly, scuttling around to appease the media will not. We must think rigorously about how to make our democracy work better.

We need more constitutionalism; more checks and balances. I suspect that we went wrong when we embraced the Diceyan heresy of the omnicompetence of Parliament. That paved the way to the elective dictatorship. Every Government since the war that have had an overall majority have felt free to do anything they fancied. The volume of legislation has hugely increased, reaching a point where the House of Commons has largely stopped scrutinising it. How are we to restrain parliamentary government? The House of Commons reform committee, chaired by Tony Wright MP, in its report Rebuilding the House, would seek to enhance the House of Commons’ control of its own agenda, timetable and proceedings. The chairs and members of Select Committees would be elected and, very importantly, the House of Commons would devote more time and energy to scrutiny of legislation on Report. Here, charmingly, the report proposed that the House of Commons should exercise the same rights as the House of Lords. That was a daringly radical proposal—clearly too radical for the Government.

The proposals of the Wright committee are good, but one must doubt whether they would transform the proceedings of the House of Commons, herald a new era of limited government and reorientate MPs’ ambitions away from ministerial office. The Wright committee is wisely cautious, in its desire to reconcile Parliament with the people, about the extension of participatory democracy. The Scottish Parliament is very good at handling petitions, but I note that the people of Scotland have no more exalted a view of their politicians than the people of England, so this is unlikely to be a cure for political disaffection. With considerable hesitation, the Wright report proposes that there should be an opportunity for the public to influence the content of draft laws, and that there should be an experiment in “agenda initiative”—the public initiation of proceedings in Parliament.

Like the members of the Wright committee, I believe in representative democracy. We need more deliberative parliamentary government, and more decisions made insulated from the pressures of politics and the 24-hour news media. The Monetary Policy Committee of the Bank of England was established in order that decisions on interest rates should be taken out of politics, and it has worked very well. California, which pioneered citizens’ initiatives and the recall of elected politicians, provides an awful warning. Universities are deprived of public funding, yet the deficit is incurable while politics is manipulated, in that state even more than elsewhere, by lobbyists and big money. If that is the future, it does not work. Policy-making and legislation are complex and difficult.

I am not enthusiastic about other fashionable nostrums. A written constitution would ossify our polity. An elected second Chamber would be dominated by the party machines and would lose much of the wisdom of the present House. Respectable arguments can be put forward for varieties of electoral reform, but they are irrelevant because the decision will always be taken by parties on an assessment of their electoral interests.

Where should our reforming energies most usefully be applied? In the House of Commons: that is most important, but that is not for us. We shall see whether the new intake of MPs after the election will, like their predecessors, fall over each other to become parliamentary private secretaries, or whether they will wish to be strong parliamentarians. The choice is for them. The people in Parliament matter much more than the mechanics.

I shall be very interested to see the evolution of the Supreme Court. We are told that the change of address will make no difference to the way in which the judges work, but I am not so sure. Parliament should be relaxed about judicial activism. The noble and learned Lord, Lord Carswell, in his excellent speech, was almost apologetic at any suggestion that the judges might take their own initiatives. However, the record of the judges in recent decades on the development of judicial review and the defence of civil rights has been nothing but good. We should not be petulant if the judges wish to correct our errors of omission or commission, and to overthrow crass or illiberal decisions taken by government or Parliament. I hope that we shall see more judicial ebullience, with its authority based on the common-law tradition, vigorously renewed for the circumstances of our time.

We need more checks and balances, so we should stop railing against unelected quangos, at any rate those set up to do sensible and necessary things. Quangos provide an opportunity for knowledgeable and good citizens to participate in government and give public service, and do so at a bargain price. We should strongly support the development of the voluntary sector, and government should bear down on it much less. Just because in many cases they pay the piper, they should not call the tune. The arm's-length principle needs refreshing and reviving, so that the Government attach far fewer conditions to their funding of universities and the arts. Just let them flourish.

Let local government flourish, too. Central government, exploiting its dominance of Parliament, has in the last half-century trampled on historic institutions and local identities and loyalties, arrogating power to itself. In a new concordat, there should be a presumption that local government is free to do anything unless it is expressly forbidden. We need more independent centres of power in England. We should disperse significant decision-taking. If we can do that in local government, we may have the prospect of a new generation of people coming into politics, widening the political class beyond the cliques of professionals who have occupied the House of Commons and, in the view of many people, pillaged it. These are some of the ways in which we could renew our democratic culture.

My Lords, I join other noble Lords in congratulating the noble and learned Lord, Lord Carswell, on a distinguished maiden speech. Like the noble Lord, Lord Howarth of Newport, I will also say that there is no need to apologise for judicial activism. Because the Human Rights Act 1998 had an effect on the Scottish Government some 15 months prior to its effect on the UK Government as a whole, I was the first Minister to be on the receiving end of a judicial pronouncement under the Act. However discomfiting or awkward the rulings could be, it is far better that the Executive are subject to the rule of law than that Ministers can override the law. The Human Rights Act has been one of the achievements of the Labour Government since they came to office in 1997.

The other issue that I wish to talk about is the Scotland Act 1998, which led to the establishment of the Scottish Parliament in 1999. The architect of that Act, Scotland's first First Minister, Donald Dewar, said that devolution was not an event but a process. It is the continuing process that I will reflect on, particularly in the light of the Calman commission on Scottish devolution, which reported last year and on which I was privileged to serve. The commission was established and given its remit by a resolution of the Scottish Parliament, and was supported by the United Kingdom Government. Its report last June was followed by a United Kingdom Government White Paper, Scotland's Future in the UK, published on 25 November. The title of the White Paper is significant given that the commission's remit was, among other things, to secure the position of Scotland within the United Kingdom. The other key parts of the remit were to serve the people of Scotland better, and to improve the financial accountability of the Scottish Parliament. I will say a brief word about each of these.

It was a unanimous report. The commission comprised, among others, Labour, Conservative and Liberal Democrat representatives, trade union representatives, someone from CBI Scotland, a retired judge from the European Court of Justice, a professor of Islamic studies and the chief executive of the Telegraph media group, with everyone acting in an individual capacity. Nevertheless, we managed to produce a unanimous report. It fell short of my party's ultimate goal of a federal United Kingdom; and it fell short of the proposals that emerged from the commission chaired by my noble friend Lord Steel of Aikwood. But I have always believed that politics is the art of the possible. It was my party’s involvement in the constitutional convention that helped pave the way for the Scottish Parliament and the Scotland Act 1998. We have been right to embrace the recommendations of the Calman commission, and to see them as a starting point for the further reforms in devolution that Liberal Democrats would like to see.

I also believe that the commission report moves the debate forward. It provides a set of proposals around which the debate on devolution now revolves. It is ironic that the minority SNP Government at Holyrood, who for the most part poured cold water on the establishment of the commission and derided our activities during the months when we were deliberating, came forward last month with a resolution for debate in the Scottish Parliament which welcomed the recommendation of the Calman commission,

“that responsibility for the law across a range of areas be devolved to the Scottish Parliament and also welcomes the recommendations for closer working between the Scottish and UK Ministers”.

In a further ironic twist, the Labour and Conservative Parties, which were each represented on the commission by two distinguished Members of this House, did not vote for the resolution on the grounds that it called for the implementation of such recommendations, where there was a clear consensus across all parties, before the dissolution of the present Parliament.

I was profoundly disappointed that the United Kingdom Government were unwilling to show sufficient eagerness to transfer the current reserve powers recommended for devolution—the drink-drive alcohol limits; the law in relation to speed limits; the law in relation to air guns; and the administration of Scottish parliamentary elections. They were unwilling to devolve those powers by order to the Scottish Parliament ahead of the election—I rather suspect now, given the timetable, that it is not feasible. There is a further suspicion that the Conservatives would kick the ball even further into the long grass, as they have advocated a further White Paper after the election. Any commitment or reassurance which either Front Bench can give us today would be particularly welcome.

I note with particular satisfaction, however, that yesterday the Secretary of State for Scotland promised that, in the event of a Labour victory in the election, there would be a Bill in the first term of the new Parliament to give effect to these changes. That commitment was given in an interview reported in the Times. If we heard a similar commitment from the government Dispatch Box, it would be very welcome. Indeed, the report states that the Scottish Parliament would also be given power over the proportion of income tax raised in Scotland as well as stamp duty, aggregate tax and air passenger duty, consistent with the Calman commission’s recommendations. I note particularly the inclusion of air passenger duty, as the Government did not attach priority to it in their White Paper. Perhaps the Minister could clarify whether there has been a change of position.

The important point is that, under these proposals, the Scottish Parliament would be obliged to make annual decisions on a range of taxes, including the Scottish income tax rate. The commission proposed that the rate levied by the United Kingdom Government be 10p less than the standard rate, with the block grant reduced accordingly. Indeed, the reduction of grant would apply also to all other taxes devolved, and it would be up to the Scottish Parliament to determine a tax rate to make up the shortfall. That, together with enhanced powers in relation to borrowing, would change the deficit in democratic accountability which has been the feature of the first 10 years of the Parliament under the existing powers, where the overwhelming focus has been on spending taxpayers’ money rather than considering the discipline of raising it. The proposal would go a long way toward addressing the point made by my noble friend Lord Steel of Aikwood in his Donald Dewar lecture of 2003, when he said that no self-respecting Parliament can exist permanently on a grant from another Parliament.

Equally important is the relationship between the Scottish Government and a UK Government, and between the Westminster Parliament and the Holyrood Parliament. Part 4 of the report has a number of recommendations. Time prohibits my going through them, but I recommend that those responsible for procedures and administration in this House identify ways in which the relevant co-operation between the two Parliaments can be established and strengthened by what we do here, not just to serve better the people of Scotland but also to help anchor Scotland even more firmly as part of our United Kingdom.

My Lords, like other speakers, I congratulate the noble and learned Lord, Lord Carswell, on his maiden speech, especially on uttering the sacred names of Barry John and Gareth Edwards, which I never thought I would hear spoken in this House. It was very heart-warming.

I shall address this welcome and admirable Motion from the standpoint of an academic and, more particularly, from that of a member of the Labour Party, which I have been for even longer than I have been an academic. As an academic, one sees the constitution in a state of some disarray and issues left unresolved, the old constitution of Bagehot and Dicey clearly having gone but it not being clear what has replaced it. We see power being both dispersed and concentrated at the same time. We have a Government who promote devolution and restrict civil liberties. This state of constitutional anomie, as it has been called by academics, I find really quite worrying.

As a member of the Labour Party, however, I see the Government as having been one of sweeping reform early on. Gordon Brown has been intellectually engaged with the topic as no previous Prime Minister has been. I should like the Labour Party to highlight itself as the party of change in democratising government, making it more accountable. It is not sensible to say that nobody discusses particular topics on the doorstep; for example, the alternative vote. There is clearly a widespread sense of constitutional and institutional crisis, and Labour should respond to it.

What do we do? Following the crisis over parliamentary expenses, we had a kind of “57 varieties” of reform proposed. More specifically, Labour should in the first instance build and defend the admirable reforms that it has produced. It should be quite unequivocal about the Human Rights Act. It should be resolute on the Freedom of Information Act. As my noble friend Lord Parekh, mentioned, there are signs that the Chilcot inquiry is being hamstrung on that side. Like the noble Lord, Lord Wallace, I shall mention devolution. He spoke wisely about Scotland. In the case of Wales, I ask my noble friend—I did not get a reply from the previous Minister, so I shall try again—what the Government will do about the Jones Parry report on a possible referendum in Wales. The present status of the Welsh Assembly is patronising and humiliating. There is no transparent system of law-making, and the rule of law is being devalued. What will the Government do? Peter Hain himself supports the committee’s proposals.

The present Constitutional Reform and Governance Bill is modest. Several of the valuable features of the previous measure, which was pretty miscellaneous, have gone—for example, war-making powers and powers of the Attorney-General, on which a somewhat lurid light was shed yesterday just across the square—but it does not get to grips with what is widely accepted as being a serious crisis in the prestige and respect with which our institutions are treated.

This is in the tradition of the Labour Party. It has a great tradition of taking the democracy element of social democracy very seriously. Tawney, in his famous lectures on equality, talked about not only equality of means but equality of power and he showed how the two are related. The Labour Party is well placed ideologically, as in other ways, to take advantage of this issue and connect reform with democracy.

One way of doing it would certainly be to take up Tony Wright’s admirable report, Rebuilding the House. I agree that the Government have been dilatory on that. We are having a debate of some sort on 23 February, but it is clear that nothing is being done. The report proposes an important way of democratising the House of Commons and making it more effective. Other democratic reforms should be pursued. I do not agree with what was said earlier about a kind of malaise about politics. There is a malaise about the major political parties and about some of our institutional processes, but that is very different. There is a great sense of urgency about politics. Some of the proposals of the Wright report should therefore be acted on; for instance, the idea of e-petitions, so that people outside the House could revitalise and bring new issues into the debates of the Commons, seems admirable. I should like the Labour Party to take on board electoral reform, not just in its manifesto but by having a referendum at the time of the general election. It is an issue of which the Labour Party could take ownership, and there would be a great deal to gain electorally. I think that some of us were very heartened when Jack Straw—not always a radical figure—took up this issue at the PLP the other day.

One word has always been missing in this debate—citizenship. If we were debating this matter in France or America, we would hear it. Our late and much lamented leader, John Smith, talked of a citizen’s democracy. We still have the tattered shreds of the royal prerogative, dating from late medieval times; it is extraordinary that we flattened Baghdad and killed a large number of its citizens in the name of the unfortunate Queen. We should celebrate a different order and a different sense of citizenship as a component of a social as well as a political democracy. A written, codified constitution would take too long and be difficult to achieve in our case-law legal culture. We should build incrementally on existing reforms and make a democratically socialist—if that is not an unparliamentary term—Labour Party the vanguard of change.

The noble Lord, Lord Tyler, introduced this admirable Motion. The Liberal Democrats should work with the Labour Party on this. They will get no change from the Conservatives, whose phobia about Europe alone means that they will find it very difficult, for example, to incorporate European law into our own arrangements. They were opposed to all previous changes and do not want any electoral reform. If the Liberal Democrats have any doubt, they should go through the portals of the National Liberal Club and see the imperishable words of the greatest ever liberal that his opponents represented,

“distrust of the people qualified by fear”.

My Lords, it is always a great pleasure to follow the noble Lord, Lord Morgan, but I thought that he thought that the greatest Liberal was Lloyd George. We learn differently now—and of course he is quite right. I was not sure whether he thought that the unparliamentary word was “democracy” or “socialism”, but I shall not pursue that. Instead, I shall talk about local democracy and public involvement; representative democracy and participative or direct democracy, done properly, go together. In doing so, I declare an interest as a member of Pendle Borough Council and sundry local groups, some of which are in the Register of Interests.

My problem is that local democracy in England is being slowly but systematically abolished. The noble Lord, Lord Howarth of Newport, said that in the past decade there had been a lot of democratisation within this country. At local level within England that is not the case; the opposite has been happening—there has been a sort of de-democratisation. Representative local democracy is slowly being closed down, with the formation of larger and larger unitary councils, which are being told that they have to run themselves like businesses. They may be democratic, but they are certainly not local. Participative democracy is much more difficult; the further that the institutions get away from the citizen, the bigger they become. The proliferation of partnerships and quangos, populated by professionals, means that it is much more difficult for ordinary citizens to get involved.

One example of the trend towards much bigger authorities is Northumberland, which is now, apparently, the largest unitary authority in England in area. It has the lowest population density, with 310,000 people, and a combination of the largest area and lowest population density, with just one local authority for that huge area, which is some 100 miles from end to end. That is not local government as I understand the term.

I should apologise to the Liberal Democrat leadership of Northumberland since the initial elections, led by Councillor Jeff Reid, for criticising it. I am certain that it is doing a much better job than if control of the authority was in the hands of the Labour or Tory party, but the job that it is being asked to do in local democracy is impossible. It has set up three area committees, which was agreed when the unitary was set up, called north, south-east and west. How on earth do people associate themselves with south-east Northumberland? They are not even the old districts, of which there used to be six. There are now 67 councillors when there used to be more than 300. That is a significant reduction in democracy. I have a sheet here that sets out all the functions of the area committees; they are all consultative and advisory, and the first function is to,

“enhance the reputation of councillors”.

That says a great deal about the system.

I compare that with an area committee that I sit on in Pendle, where we represent 16,000 electors—an area of a small district council—but make real decisions that have a real effect on the lives of local people, who can come along because we are there in Colne where people live. They do not have to travel 40 or 50 miles to a meeting of an authority.

I wish the Liberal Democrat leadership of Northumberland all the best in its aim for better services, greater efficiency and easier access to local services. I think that it will find it extremely difficult. When the Northumberland unitary was set up, the Government promised around £17 million a year savings and lower tax bills. Now there are no lower tax bills—they went up—and the savings have all been swallowed up. My right honourable friend Alan Beith MP said that it was nonsense at the time, and the public did not believe them. Can we trust the Tories on this issue? There are not many Tories here to ask, but those who are here will perhaps listen.

In Lancashire three or four years ago, the Labour county council set up a system of Lancashire Locals, which were area committees, one for each district in Lancashire—the 12 districts. We thought that they were a bit big, but they have made some decisions. They are only very local ones, such as on traffic management issues and allocation of grants, but there has been a forum there and a way in which a very remote and large county could devolve some of its public discussion and decisions. They are now being abolished by the new county regime since the Conservatives got elected last June. Whatever words we hear from the Tories about localism and devolution, the experience in Lancashire is that they will do the opposite if and when they get into power.

The future is the reinvention of democratic, representative local government. No party at the moment has a blueprint for this, or knows the way to go exactly, but it has to take place. At the moment, it is going in the wrong direction. Alan Beith said in Northumberland that we have to devolve responsibility for town councils and give them a bigger role. I am sure that that is part of it. It is no secret that “civic”, used in expressions such as civic society, refers to towns. When the Victorians invented democratic local government, a great deal of it was concentrated and based on towns—large cities, smaller towns, including very small towns. Towns have a presence and an existence, and I believe that probably local government will have to be reinvented on the basis of the towns that exist, not large arbitrary areas that do not really represent anybody.

My noble friend Lord Wallace of Saltaire is currently chairing a group in the Liberal Democrats looking at devolution and localism. I look forward to his report, but even we in our party have not begun to think about the radical evolutionary changes that will be necessary at local level if we want to reinvent local democracy. That will be a major task for this country over the next 10 to 15 years.

My Lords, your Lordships’ interest in this subject is shown by the number of speakers today, so we have every reason to be grateful to the noble Lord, Lord Tyler, for initiating this debate.

In his notably, but not unexpectedly, wise maiden speech, the noble and learned Lord, Lord Carswell, reminded us that we have a flexible constitution and reminded us of the words of Lord Hailsham: if you are considering constitutional change, be careful. I agree, but I want to make the point that in some ways our constitution can be too flexible for its own good, so that changes can take place in it that we scarcely notice. I shall illustrate that: over a long period, the Executive has taken means of getting control of the elected Chamber of our Parliament to the extent that it cannot properly fulfil the role that it ought to.

When we last debated this issue in the debate on the gracious Speech in November, the Wright committee in another place was about to report, and the report came out the following day. Like other speakers, such as the noble Lords, Lord Maclennan and Lord Howarth, I was impressed by that report. It made valuable proposals for reinforcing the influence of Back-Benchers over the House’s business while maintaining the ability of the Executive to get its business through. It is also encouraging that the Prime Minister has said that the Government will support the committee’s main recommendations. I hope that the Minister will be able to give us an assurance that the Government will also provide the procedural means of implementing the Prime Minister’s statement.

As I said in the debate on the gracious Speech, while the procedures of this House are not subject to the stranglehold of the Executive apparent in another place, we would be complacent if we thought them incapable of improvement. The noble Lord, Lord Brooke of Alverthorpe, who is not in his place today, has proposed that a working group should be set up in your Lordships’ House to consider this matter, and I support his proposal. The Leader of the House did not react adversely to that, and if there is anything further that the Minister can say about it, that would be very good.

The role of Parliament is important—I would say vital—in keeping the Government up to the mark. The fact that the Executive has had things too easy for its own good for too long in getting legislation through Parliament has meant that there has been too much legislation, not just recently but over many years, and it has been inadequately prepared and justified.

I shall illustrate that by mentioning just two Bills that are about to come to your Lordships’ House. One is the Personal Care at Home Bill, on a subject that is of great interest to many of your Lordships: how the state should provide for citizens in their old age. It has long been a matter of debate how that cost should be divided between the individuals themselves and the state. There was a royal commission on it, there was a committee under Sir Derek Wanless and there has been a Green Paper, which is still out for consultation. The Green Paper ruled out free care entirely paid for by the taxpayer, but even during the period of consultation, out of the blue, the Prime Minister announced at the Labour Party conference that all individuals with the highest needs for free personal care in their own home would have it provided by the taxpayer—that announcement, as I say, made while the consultation procedure on a Green Paper that ruled it out is still continuing. The cost of that proposal will be £570 million a year, and that is the Government’s estimate.

The Bill was rushed through all its stages—First Reading, Second Reading, Committee, Report and Third Reading—in the House of Commons in a single day, and it comes to your Lordships next week. That is no way to propose policy and to give Parliament the chance to comment on it.

The second example is the Constitutional Reform and Governance Bill, which contains legislation on the Civil Service, in which I take an interest. We have waited 150 years for that legislation. The Committee stage took four to five hours in another place, under the guillotine, and there was simply not time for important amendments, some of which the noble Lord, Lord Tyler, referred to, about whistleblowing, special advisers and other matters. That, again, is no way to cause the Government to be careful in preparing legislation about important constitutional issues.

Last night, with other noble Lords from all political parties, I took part in the launch of a report by the Better Government Initiative, on whose executive committee I have served. One of that group’s central recommendations is that the Government should commit themselves to better procedures of preparation and consultation of legislation—standards of preparation against which government proposals can be judged. Parliament should also be the proper and effective judge of whether those procedures have been observed.

In the short term, I recognise that this might be more troublesome for the Executive, but I firmly believe that it is in its long-term interests as well as those of Parliament. It is to nobody’s benefit to conduct government poorly, least of all the interests of the Government who want to be re-elected. The tools are there to support good government in the Executive, the Civil Service and Parliament, if they are all used properly. Yet if they are all to be used properly we need, to quote an old political slogan, “Action, not just words”.

My Lords, I want to use the short time available to argue in favour of supporting a referendum, or some kind of national debate, on a choice between first past the post and the alternative vote. I believe that that view is supported by my right honourable friend the Prime Minister and many other members of the Cabinet. Taking my cue from my esteemed teacher and noble friend Lord Parekh, I say this not for theoretical reasons but because the alternative vote would be a way to answer two quite deep problems that we have in British politics at the moment.

First, after the expenses scandal, we need to do as much as we can to repair the legitimacy of individual Members of the House of Commons, but in a way that does not destroy constituency accountability. That is one risk, at least, with the single transferable vote in multimember constituencies and it would certainly happen under a national rigid closed list system. The alternative vote would keep the constituency link while enhancing the individual legitimacy of successful candidates, because they would have to gain 51 per cent of the vote in their constituency.

Secondly, the alternative vote would mean that candidates had to broaden the appeal of their electoral pitch in order to have a chance of collecting significant numbers of second-preference votes. That would be ideal. It would allow an individual candidate to preserve his or her political identity—as a member of the Labour Party, say. However, they would also have to reach outside that form of identity to engage with other people with different points of view in order to secure second-preference votes. That would break down some of the tribalism of British politics, which people who are not political nerds find completely maddening. That tribalism does not in any case map on to what, in non-electoral terms, we know about how people generally perceive political issues.

The alternative vote would also help us to deal with two other problems that will be intractable for the next generation: climate change and international terrorism. They are challenges of a quite different sort from those that previous Governments have faced because they are general, highly complex and long term—they are likely to be, anyway—yet they are also less obvious, palpable and tangible. Terrorism is not like having an army facing you in northern France, or something like that. Climate change is about the balance of probabilities and the precautionary principles that we have to follow in the light of that for the long-term future. Yet facing terrorism and climate change will require us to change our behaviour now, and make sacrifices now, in favour of some rather intangible challenges in the future.

In order to do that, it seems to me that we cannot pursue the policies to meet those challenges on a highly partisan basis. We need an electoral system that will allow and give an incentive to parties to reach out to other groups so as to create greater strength and legitimacy for the policies that they are devising to tackle some of those very problems. We need to mobilise more consent and legitimacy around those policies if, as I have suggested, they are to be able to do the work that we need them to do.

Of course, it is perfectly possible that an electoral system such as the alternative vote would lead to cross-party or coalition government. It is argued strongly by those who believe it that this means weak government. That is not true. There is a distinction to be drawn between effective and strong government. We have had two or three examples in the past 15 or 20 years of strong government. The poll tax was an exercise in strong government. The Iraq war was an exercise in strong government. However, these constituted some of the greatest misjudgments in modern British politics. Exercises in strong government of that sort we could do without. We need effective government, which needs a high level of consent behind it.

Germany has had extremely effective governance. It was in the front line during the Cold War. It managed to deal with an unforeseen reunification process in an extremely capable way. You cannot just say that coalition Governments are always weak; that is ridiculous. Coalition Governments can be extremely effective. If they rest on an electoral system that gives parties an incentive to reach out beyond themselves while retaining their own strong identity, they can mobilise a great deal more consent behind the policies that we need to deal with some of the long-term and intractable difficulties that we face.

My Lords, as the only other Peer from Northern Ireland to be speaking in today’s debate, I add my welcome to the noble and learned Lord, Lord Carswell. It is a delight to have him here and to hear his welcome accent. He and his wife Romayne, as Lord Lieutenant of my home city of Belfast, have played an extremely distinguished role in Northern Ireland public life. If he has held to that motto “Be careful”, it is characteristic that there is one good reason why he should have done so that he has not mentioned. He and other members of the judiciary in Northern Ireland have had not only to have a clear judicial mind and wise judgment but also to be careful for their lives and personal security over the whole of their professional careers because they were under attack from terrorists. Even now, with the peace process, there are dissidents who would target noble and learned Lords and other judicial figures in Northern Ireland. The noble and learned Lord’s courage and conviction, as well as his wisdom and judgment, are to be commended and will undoubtedly be an adornment to your Lordships’ House.

In today’s debate it has been noted that the Government of the past few years have brought forward substantial constitutional development. There has been devolution to Scotland, Wales and, in a hiccupping way, Northern Ireland. The independence of the Bank of England has its own implications. The Human Rights Acts has of course been welcomed from these Benches and other parts of the House.

However, it is a characteristic of this country that we go by evolution rather than revolution. Indeed, with the Glorious Revolution of 1688, we moved from one kind of monarchy to another. We do not tend to have revolutions in this country, which is not necessarily a bad thing. There has been significant progress over a period, which has been welcomed from these Benches. There have been positive developments in your Lordships’ House, such as the disappearance of the hereditary principle and the development of the principle that no governing party should have a majority. That is an important constitutional development. If it is indeed the case that, after the next general election, there is a largely Conservative Government, it will be the first time in modern party political history that a Conservative Government will have come in with a majority in the other place but not in your Lordships’ House. These are significant developments, so why does considerable disenchantment remain in the country?

There are two reasons. The first is this apparently contrary movement of centralisation and devolution. It is quite clear that, without great legislation, a major constitutional change has taken place: the move towards an increasingly presidential style of government by Prime Ministers. This is not just to do with the current or previous Prime Minister; it has been going on for some time. More and more power is brought to the Executive so that not only those in opposition parties but many of those on the Back Benches in a government party—that is evidenced by some of the speeches made in your Lordships’ House today—do not feel that they have a real part to play. Why is that? It is because we now have a presidential style of government without the checks and balances of a presidential constitution.

Why was this able to take place while at the same time there was devolution? It happened, first, because part of it was motivated by the notion that if we could have devolution to Wales, Scotland and Northern Ireland we would get these difficult people at a distance and off our backs, so that people in this part of the world could simply get on with their own business. Therefore, I do not think that devolution was done necessarily with a sense of simply increasing democratisation. Of course, there were other pressures that moved things in that direction. If there had not been, we would have to assume an incoherent approach to politics, governance and constitution and I do not think that we should.

Secondly, devolution allows for different experiments and approaches to government. That is of great value if they are then taken into account, but not if they are ignored or simply ruled out because, well, they do silly things in Scotland, Wales and Northern Ireland. We may take up some, but not all, of the different things that the devolved Administrations and Parliaments try out. Not everything will constitute progress or be appropriate to take up on a wider front, but there is an opportunity to do that if we pay attention and take these things into account. The same is true of our friends in the rest of the European Union, in the European Parliament and in other Parliaments in Europe. We can look to others if, of course, we are not completely closed in on ourselves. I was interested to note when the noble Lords, Lord Steel of Aikwood and Lord Elis-Thomas, and I were present at a Commonwealth Speakers conference that the Speaker in another place and the Lord Chancellor sent deputies. Speakers from all the rest of the Commonwealth countries were present. Was that because this place has nothing to learn from anywhere else?

There is another reason why there is disenchantment. It is because parties have got into a way of promising things at elections and not delivering them subsequently, sometimes because they found it inconvenient to do so but on other occasions because they knew from the start that they were promising things that they had no intention of ever delivering. The Financial Times editorial of Wednesday last week referred to fantasy budgeting whereby political parties put forward financial propositions that they know cannot possibly be put into operation. I think it fair to point out in passing that my right honourable friend Nick Clegg and the Liberal Democrats were excluded from that criticism.

The population will inevitably become disenchanted if we promise them things that are not delivered and, worse still, promise them things that there is no intention of delivering. They will become disenchanted if consultation is carried out not in order to listen and make changes but to hear and then ignore. That makes people feel that there is no point in voting. We need changes in electoral systems and more transparency as regards changes in institutions and regulations. People feel that there is no point in voting because there is no intention of taking into account the representations that are made. There has to be an attitude of respect—not the sort of respect with which a parliamentarian starts off a parliamentary speech by saying, “With all due respect”, and then goes on to make a speech that is characterised by something wholly different, but a true respect that listens to others and takes their views into account, as a result of which one changes one’s approach and position. If we can achieve that, I believe that we will find ourselves not breaking the law, as our Government have clearly done domestically and internationally, and not pushing it to the limits, as in the expenses fracas at the other end, in which people said, “I am only going by the rules”, when the spirit was obviously absent. We will build respect in the population and a wish to engage in political life when people see it as something exciting rather than disenchanting, and honest and honourable rather than something of which at times to despair.

The House has resolved that this debate should last three hours. We started the debate with a nine-minute buffer. That is now all used up. The extent to which speeches exceed six minutes will be taken out of the Minister’s response.

My Lords, I am the only woman to speak in this debate, so it is perhaps appropriate that I take the “pouring the tea” role of looking at domestic matters inside this House.

This House is not in a shape to be able to respond swiftly and effectively to the public’s pressing demand that our democracy should be reinvigorated. We do not adhere to the fundamental principles of good corporate governance—clear leadership, overt lines of accountability, fit-for-purpose processes, and clear mechanisms for proper engagement by Members. Unless we get our own House in order, we will never be able to assert the important role of Parliament in relation to the Executive, play our proper complementary role to the Commons or become a modern, proactive second Chamber, whether or not we change the membership. Members need to develop a sense of ownership of the House in relation to its administration and the way that we determine the business. I fully understand that the Government are entitled to get their business through this place in a timely manner.

Before coming here, I had naively believed that the government Executive and Parliament were two separate things and that the House of Lords would have governance and accountability systems in place that would be explicit, written and connect me as a Back-Bencher with the business of the House. I was given the Grey Book. On this parliamentary route there is only one double-decker bus and the driver and conductor are the Government and their inseparable mates, the usual channels—of whom of course there is no mention in the Grey Book, and they are a total mystery for at least five years after you arrive.

We are said to be a self-governing House, but that should not mean a House where everyone has the power to be awkward, as it frequently seems to mean. It should mean that we elect respected leaders of our choice and allow them to govern our House on terms that we have decided.

Wherever there is a power vacuum in a corporate body, any well organised group will inevitably rise up and take that power. In our case the better organised group is the usual channels. I hasten to add that I do not blame individuals, political parties or the Government for this; it seems to be an inevitable consequence of our history, but we need to do something to reverse it. Even the desk that I am allowed to sit at is determined by the usual channels. That goes for everyone here. Is that common sense? The usual channels are the lead weight that keeps the moribund body of self-governance from floating to the surface for some air.

The role of the Management Board as the executive implementation of House Committee strategy and policy is clear. We are served by a talented team of clerks and directors of services who, to give them their due, have been in the vanguard of developing the annual plan, the strategic planning round, the risk register and so on, and who are improving daily the ways in which they serve us. It is we who let them down by the dead weight of our time-worn procedures. Most of the time, this House runs well—until there is a crisis. This is what someone has called the problem of the car crash scenario, when the question “Who really decides?” is horribly sticky.

We have created the new post of the Lord Speaker but have given her few powers. She chairs the House Committee, which officially is the strategic governing body of this place but which is dominated, like everything else, by—guess who—the usual channels. There is in reality a vacuum, a black hole, in which the Lord Speaker, the Leader of the House and perhaps the Chairman of Committees whirl about with insufficient and competing powers. There is no thinking powerhouse with a remit to translate ideas for modernisation into a House strategy. In the absence of a clear parliamentary leader, we fall back on the Government’s representative in this House. Should our leadership be someone who we as parliamentarians choose, not a member of the Cabinet? I do not criticise individuals—indeed I am a real fan of the noble Baroness, Lady Royall, and the way that she has tackled problems recently. Individuals have to make our difficult systems work as best they can, but the system is crazy.

We should perhaps reassess the potential for the Lord Speaker to play a real leadership role in parliamentary business, both inside and outside the Chamber. It is of pre-eminent importance that we should prise the administration and business of this House, and the connection to Back-Benchers, from the shackles of the usual channels.

My Lords, we have had a very good example of what the noble Baroness has just been talking about. It should not be a government Front-Bench Member who gets up to tell noble Lords when they have exceeded the time limit for speaking. Today, we have seen a classic case of where the Deputy Speaker should have had the power to stop people who indulge themselves by taking more than six minutes.

I wish to speak on aspects of electoral reform, although it is too late for change to take place before the general election. I am somewhat astonished that those who have never expressed the slightest interest in having a fair voting system should seek to become the champions of fair voting just before an election when the polls are looking bad. It seems a little bit vulgar, to say the least. The credibility of the argument is diminished in the eyes of the public when it is put forward in that way.

In some ways, the real problem is that the Conservative Party has never really woken up to the fact that, for the past 20 years at least, there has been a bias in the first past the post system against the Tory Party. It has never really realised that. The fact that the Conservatives need an 11-point lead in the popular vote to get a one-seat majority in the Commons must be a worry. It is obviously not a worry for the noble Lord, Lord Ashcroft, who has spotted the way to deal with it within the present system.

In the early 1990s, the Tories recognised this difficulty and thought, “We’ll speed up the Boundary Commission timetable because there is a problem with population changes being taken account of under our rigid first past the post system”. Their problem was—I know this to my certain knowledge—that the Labour Party took control of the Boundary Commission process in the early 1990s in order to create an extra-large number of marginal seats. I also know to my certain knowledge that Labour MPs were sent to public boundary inquiries to argue for less safe seats for themselves in order to create some more marginals that we could win. The result, of course, was 1997.

None of that is right or fair for the voters. Taking an example almost at random, I can say that Tory voters in Sutton Coldfield will be taken for granted by the Tories, and Labour, even with its excellent candidate, will not put any extra resources into that seat. Likewise, Labour voters in Ladywood will be taken for granted by the Labour Party and the Tories will probably not appear.

Having this great swathe of safe seats where the electorate is taken for granted means that the battles are all happening in the marginals, which is what the battle with the Boundary Commission was all about. That means that people’s votes are not of equal value, and in our modern constitution that has to be wrong. The solution would be to have the Tory Party fighting its case in every back street of every inner-city ward in this country, in the same way as it would in rural areas, because then the votes would have equal value. The same applies to the other political parties. That fairness can occur only in a system based on one of the many variants of proportional representation.

The alternative vote system is not proportional representation but is as fixed and rigid as first past the post. It is a stopping-off point for every person I have ever known who has moved away from first past the post and towards PR. I did it myself for a few months in the late 1980s. Then, from 1988 to 1992—here I declare an interest—I became chair of the Labour Campaign for Electoral Reform.

The alternative vote is a majoritarian system, with all the problems that that entails, and it still leaves us with safe seats and marginal seats. My noble friend Lord Plant set out the advantages of AV, although I was a bit surprised by that because I would rather have the German system, as that would solve our problems. I would prefer the system that we imposed on Germany after the war, rather than AV, because we would get the best of both worlds. AV, on the other hand, would leave millions of people in this country unrepresented. They would have voted for a party but would have no link whatever with representation. If AV is ever brought before Parliament for approval, I shall oppose it, and actively so, because in reality it is as fixed, rigid and unfair as first past the post. The Liberals need to be warned about that and warned not to buy a pig in a poke. They may be everyone’s second choice and they may think they will gain a few extra seats, but they will still leave millions unrepresented, so they should not buy it if it is offered.

My Lords, it will not be offered.

My Lords, the situation will be the same: huge party majorities in the Commons based on a minority of votes. When the going gets tough and the leaders look round, there will be no voters behind them. The fact is that they were never there in the first place because they got in on a minority vote.

It is time for a change in our approach. To their credit, this Government, with all the changes they have made, have not brought the first past the post system in anywhere. No one in eastern Europe bought it; the South Africans did not buy it; Wales, Scotland and the London Assembly did not buy it. If the Tories wake up soon, they might see that first past the post is not a winner. I want the voter to be the winner. I also want my vote back when this place is reformed. I want the voter to be the winner and that is why I support a move to proportional representation.

My Lords, in today’s wide-ranging debate, I wish to concentrate on electoral reform in the context of cleaning up the reputation of Parliament, giving power to the people where it belongs, rather than to politicians, and aiming at a realistic appraisal of the prospects of progress towards what we on these Benches really want to see.

This week, the Cabinet was due to consider whether the voters of this country should have a vote on the system by which their Members of Parliament are chosen. I understand that those discussions have not yet taken place. In recent times, what has been actively under consideration is still a very weak and watered-down alternative to what was promised in the Labour manifesto of 1997. In that manifesto, people were promised the opportunity to vote for a proportional system to replace the first-past-the-post system at Westminster.

Last October, the Prime Minister promised that the next Labour manifesto would contain a promise to hold a referendum on the alternative vote system. Many of us asked what would be the difference between this promise and the one made in 1997. Of course, cynics—there are perhaps plenty in this Chamber—could easily say that a promise in Labour's next manifesto would be fundamentally different to that of 1997, in that Labour now has no realistic expectation of being in a position to deliver it. The Government’s prevarication, posturing and repositioning have damaged the reputation of our political system.

In the past 13 years, we should have seen action to enhance the reputation of Parliament by ensuring a proper public debate and a public vote on this issue. There is still a glimmer of light at the end of the tunnel of obfuscation on electoral reform. Some people say that it may be a death-bed conversion. Others will criticise action at the 59th minute of the 11th hour. Indeed, it is only in the past few months, in the 13th year of government, that Labour has given serious consideration to partially fulfilling its promise to give people some say in the matter. The proposition that I understand it may put forward falls a long way short, as the noble Lord, Lord Rooker, illustrated, of a properly democratic and proportional solution which would ensure that votes in at least one Chamber of Parliament reflect votes in the country.

However, if that proposition is made, it is one that I believe all supporters of more radical electoral reform will have to support. The alternative of denying people a say and maintaining the status quo will mean that we kick consideration of the issue even further into the long grass. I am not generally an enthusiast of referenda. Too often the question that people vote on is different from the question on the ballot paper. A representative democracy, rather than a direct democracy, maintains important safeguards, but the strongest case for a referendum that could be made must surely be one for the voters to vote on how they elect their representatives.

It cannot be democratic for those elected under the existing system—which, in reality, in safe seats often means being appointed by the parties—to choose the system by which they themselves are re-elected or, effectively, reappointed. A referendum on some reform is better than no referendum and no prospect of people being allowed to consider change.

The AV system is not proportional, and can turn large majorities into very large majorities, but the present system does not even guarantee that the party that wins the most votes wins the most seats. It means that most MPs are elected with a majority of votes cast against them. Under the AV system, at the very least, as the noble Lord, Lord Plant, pointed out, MPs would need the majority support of their voters to be re-elected or elected. For those people who put the single-member constituency link at the top of their priorities, that would be preserved with the alternative vote. There would not be the problems of party list systems identified by many noble Lords in a debate initiated by the noble Lord, Lord Alton of Liverpool, last week. That is why, however belatedly and inadequately, it must be right to put the issue to the people. I hope that the Minister, in whatever time he has left, will confirm to us this afternoon what process of deliberative thinking the Government are now going through to decide on this most important democratic issue.

My Lords, this is a good time for us to be taking stock of political and constitutional reform. Therefore, we should be very grateful to the noble Lord, Lord Tyler, for providing us with this opportunity.

We have discussed the question of reform against the background of what this Government have achieved in areas such as devolution, the Lords reform of 1999 and the Freedom of Information Act. Notwithstanding those changes, and whatever our view of them, there has been a steady, ineluctable decline in trust in the Government and in Parliament. One can attribute that to many reasons—partly Iraq and the breakdown in trust in the Government about that, partly the manner in which Governments have taken decisions, and, not least, the expenses issue in Parliament. All that is reflected in lower voter turnout.

Moreover, if we take into account worldwide evidence from organisations such as Transparency International and Freedom House, we have seen a serious decline in liberal democracy in the past few years compared to the early 1990s, and greater instability worldwide. We in this country, along with our democratic colleagues in other countries, need to put across very strongly the arguments in favour of democracy. It becomes much more difficult to do so if we do not have sufficient confidence in the management of our own democratic system. We cannot afford to be complacent on this matter.

Against that background, what should our attitude be? There have been endless ideas today about reform. If we try to implement all those ideas, nothing will happen at all. In my view, we need to be more focused, as the noble Lord, Lord Norton, said. I suggest that the overwhelming need is to strengthen the parliamentary system to enable us to scrutinise and hold Governments to account more effectively, while identifying the public more fully with the process, and accepting and recognising that elected Governments have a right to govern. To achieve that, we need an overall strategic framework. If we are to bring about coherent, consistent change, it will have to be incremental, pragmatic, continuous and over a long period. It must not be populist; for if it is, we will achieve nothing. Improvements must be justified on their merit.

Of course, the Commons—the other House—and the Lords are different and need different treatment, but what happens in one House affects the other. For example, if a new Government decide to reduce the size of the other House, that will affect the overall relationship between the Commons and the Lords. If the Wright proposals on Select Committees are introduced, there will be a strong read-across to this Chamber. Therefore, my main remarks will, for the moment, be on the Lords.

If we assume that the choice between an elected House and an appointed House will come a bit further down the road, we ought to concentrate on making the present system as effective and efficient as possible. We had the Wakeham report, the Steel committee and other considerations in the past, but we now have the Constitutional Reform and Governance Bill, which deals with only part of this problem. It deals with hereditary by-elections, expulsions and disclaiming peerages, but it does not deal with statutory provisions for the Appointments Commission, the length of service we should do in this House, the retirement policy and the size of the House; so there are many things that need dealing with.

There is also the question of Select Committees and the Wright proposals in the other Chamber. They are designed to strengthen Select Committees, which are one of the ways in which we can strengthen the legislature in challenging the Executive. There is a big read-across there, and I agree with everything that my noble friend Lord Butler said about them. There is the scrutiny of legislation. I think there is far too much legislation, but whatever legislation there is, we ought to scrutinise it better. We do not do it badly here, but it needs to be better done in the other place and better done here as well.

We then come to procedures. This is an ongoing process here. It is interesting to note the number of changes that have been made—there have been adjustments to the way in which we manage Question Time—but we have to examine the powers of the Lord Speaker before the five-year term is up in July 2011. There is internal governance, which my noble friend Lady Murphy raised. We are handling the expenses situation and the code of conduct, but there is the structure of the House and whether it has the right system of accountability and lines of responsibility. They always need examining and improving.

Finally, there is the relationship between the two Houses. We work in considerable ignorance of each other and each other’s affairs. There is a remarkable lack of mutual understanding. I hope that the Speakers in the new Parliament will take a lead in trying to get the two Houses to work more closely together. All this needs to be done against a background of buttressing the communications and link between Parliament and the public, which is needed more than ever and can be effective only if this Chamber and the other House are more effective.

My Lords, I really am grateful to the noble Lord, Lord Tyler, for introducing this debate. It is becoming a part of our unwritten constitution that every few months he introduces a debate such as this. We all have an enjoyable discussion, and today has been no exception. We do it with the imminent election in mind and in the certain knowledge that virtually none of the issues that we have been discussing today will be mentioned on any of the doorsteps that we will be standing on in the next few months. That is not necessarily a bad thing, but the next time the noble Lord introduces a debate such as this, in two or three months’ time, it will interesting if he and other noble Lords can report on the number of occasions when any of these issues were raised with them on real doorsteps in real parts of the country.

However, last time, the noble Lord did me the honour—I regard it as a note of affection—of calling me a dinosaur for my views on some of these subjects. As other noble Lords have reminded us, dinosaurs are remarkable creatures from a bygone age. To me, that pretty well describes the Liberal Party on the 100th anniversary of the last time it managed to persuade the people of this country to elect a Liberal Government. I gently suggest that one of the reasons may be that it concentrates rather too much on these issues and rather less on more practical issues. However, I take the accusation seriously. I do not want to be a dinosaur any more, so I will do something different today. Perhaps this will be an innovation; instead of addressing all my questions to my noble friend on the Front Bench, which is what we normally do, and bearing in mind the imminent election, I will address them first to those on the Conservative and Liberal Front Benches, and then to my noble friend.

Let us deal with those on the Conservative Front Bench first. I do this very much against the background of knowing that there is a problem with trust between Parliament and the people and that things must be done to repair it, and being alarmed by something that the Conservatives are proposing, and which I am certain the Liberals will propose, that will further undermine trust between Parliament and the public.

What alarms me about the Conservatives is their suggestion that we can connect better with the public by reducing the number of Members of Parliament. That is a bewildering argument, and I speak with a little authority, because if you reduce the number of MPs you obviously increase the size of constituencies, both geographically and in the number of constituents. When I was in Parliament, I represented the fifth or sixth largest constituency, and believe me, representing 92,000 or 93,000 people is very hard work. With the best will in the world, you cannot do as good a job as you can with a smaller electorate. I want to hear from them how that will improve our democracy. I am particularly interested in their suggestion that somehow it is justified because it will reduce the cost of democracy.

I simply cannot understand how a party can propose on the one hand reducing the number of MPs in the Commons by about 100, and on the other proposing 300 or so elected Members of the House of Lords to reduce the cost of democracy. That is one thing that it will not do. Directly elected Members of the House of Lords will certainly need the same support as properly elected Members of the House of Commons. The Conservatives will also have to address costs such as those of the boundary commission, which costs about £12 million and takes about six years to deliberate, so this needs a bit of work.

I turn now to the Lib Dems, although I will also have to address my remarks to one or two colleagues on my side of the House. What they all had in common, including my very good friend the noble Lord, Lord Rooker, was that they all talked about proportional representation. However, not one—I listened carefully—mentioned our experience of it in this country in the past 10 years. I find that quite astonishing. They make all sorts of assertions about the joys of PR without pointing out the faults that have occurred in the systems that have been introduced. My noble friend Lord Rooker played with the idea of all these people waiting to vote in all these areas of the country where they have so far been disfranchised. That simply has not happened. It did not happen in the European elections, for which the turnout was even lower than under the first-past-the-post system, and—I have said this before but will say it again because it needs a wider audience—it clearly has not happened mathematically. Where the two systems—the first-past-the-post system and the list system—exist side by side, as they do in Scotland, wonder of wonders; more people vote in the first-past-the-post system than in the list system. That is exactly what happened in Scotland in 2000.

How on earth can you say that a list system liberates people and they all turn out and vote, when the clear mathematical evidence is that people prefer to participate in the first-past-the-post system? That is demonstrable. I wish that some attention could be paid to this. The Labour Government should be thanked—they should not thank me because I did not want it—for the changes that have been made in relation to PR, but please let us know what all the benefits have been and let us see the letters of thanks from the electors and the other bits of evidence, which no doubt they simply omitted to pass on to us.

My final request is to my noble friend on the Front Bench. I know he will be able to say yes, so I put it to him. Please will he assure us that the Ministry of Justice will approach constitutional reform on the basis that one or two speakers have already mentioned: identifying a problem and finding a solution? That is the way to do it. Let it not look for the joyous solution to all problems, which is the implicit promise of people who look at this in a grandiose way; let it address the problems and find the solutions. That is what my noble friend always does, so I thought that I would end with an easy request.

My Lords, I remember reading one of the wonderful short essays by Francis Bacon when I was a student. It starts by stating that money, like muck, is best when most widely spread. One of the principles of liberal democracy is that power and wealth should be as widely spread as possible. Our first debate today was about fairness in income and wealth. Now we are talking about fairness in power.

We have a concentrated, overcentralised system. That is the other side of popular alienation, which most people in this country see as the introverted gain of Westminster, Whitehall, Millbank and Abingdon Green. Ministers offer a new initiative each day. Shadow Ministers offer alternative initiatives. There is ministerial churning and 150 ministerial posts. The average length of time a Minister spends in a ministerial office is between 12 months and 18 months. The average length of time that a department of state exists has fallen to somewhere between four years and five years. That is grossly inefficient and ineffective government. We cannot deny that we have deep, popular disillusion with democratic government as a whole, which is part of the problem we all have to address.

We may be facing a Conservative Government in the next few months who would be very much not concerned with this issue. There is a small group of people who are determined to get back into power and who are quite willing to override their own party. I cherish the memory of someone quite close to David Cameron who, 18 months ago, said in a debate with some of us, “You can forget about the Conservative Party. We have taken it over”. In the way in which it is forcing candidates onto constituency associations, we can see the highly centralist authoritarian way in which it is performing. I recall with real pleasure the speech of the noble Lord, Lord Strathclyde, when we said goodbye to the Law Lords. He suggested that it was a little too soon to move towards the establishment of a Supreme Court, indicating deep resistance to change of any sort.

On these Benches, we are much more disappointed with the sliding back of Labour over the past 12 years from its initial mild enthusiasm for constitutional reform to what we now face. This morning, I looked at the 2007 Green Paper, The Governance of Britain, which I am sure that the noble Lord, Lord Bach, knows off by heart. He will recall that paragraph 10 states:

“The Government has these goals: to invigorate our democracy, with people proud to participate in decision-making at every level; to clarify the role of government, both central and local; to rebalance power between Parliament and the Government, and give Parliament more ability to hold the Government to account; and to work with the British people to achieve a stronger sense of what it means to be British”—

meaning citizenship and all that—

“and to launch an inclusive debate on the future of the country’s constitution”.

That was stated in July 2007 and we have had very nearly four years since then.

Two years.

Let us say three years. We have the Constitutional Reform and Governance Bill limping through the Commons with much delay in the calendaring of additional Committee days, which will come to the Lords when we will have very little time to consider it. There is much argument within the Labour Party about whether it could make a promise to have a referendum on the alternative vote, apparently having forgotten that that was one of its clearest pledges in the 1997 Labour manifesto, on which some Members on the Labour Benches of this House were standing for election to the other place. It is now agonising over whether it can get quite as far as it did 12 years ago. That is not a bad definition of a dinosaur; namely, someone who is not quite sure that he wants to stay where he was a long time ago.

As regards this House, there is one particular thing on which I should like to ask the Conservatives Benches to make a pledge. I refer to the question of making it easier to retire from the Lords. We know that after the election we will have a substantial addition of new Members nominated to this Chamber. The Conservative Benches will need reinforcement. It is the oldest group in the House. Others will come in to sit on other Benches. We will become well over 800 again and all the talk about economy and the costs of the Lords will come back to bite us unless we keep in a reform of that kind. I think I know the noble Lord, Lord Strathclyde, well enough to suggest that he will want to knock it out. I should like the noble Lord, Lord Luke, to have a quiet word with him and say that the effectiveness and reputation of this House depend on getting through that interim reform.

We are badly governed as a country. One looks at the churning of ministerial departments; we have had a number of education Acts—one a year since 1997—and two or three Home Office Bills a year since then. We recognise that the myth of strong government does not provide us with effective government. We have fast government which, rather like fast food, gives the people indigestion. We need slower and more considered government. I recommend to those who are interested the speech that Nick Clegg gave to the Institute of Government on Tuesday, which set out very well my party’s views on the direction in which constitutional reform needs to move. It includes a rebalancing of central and local government relations; a radical decentralisation of power; control over executive dominance; voting reform, of course; and a number of other measures.

On voting reform, I welcome the comments of the noble Lord, Lord Rooker. I was in Yorkshire last weekend discussing our targeting of seats there. We are targeting about one in five of the seats in Yorkshire and—what really strikes me from the discussions—so are the other parties. This means that there will be quite a lot of seats in Yorkshire that no one will do much work in. They are almost all Labour safe seats. It is a part of the democratic desert in Britain, and that should worry us. The Labour Party introduced the single-member constituency—we used to have multi-member constituencies—and it ought to think seriously about whether it wants to retain a system which allows you to parachute people in. There are several former Islington councillors in Labour safe seats in Yorkshire—indeed, several members of the Cabinet have been parachuted into seats in Yorkshire—and that is not very democratic.

I say to the noble Lord, Lord Grocott, that if we had had a single-member constituency system for the European elections, perhaps only two or three Labour MEPs would have been elected—probably fewer than UKIP—and that might have left us all a little uncomfortable.

Executive dominance is a real problem for all of us. The Government promised to do something about it but have not; they retain their prerogative powers, including those in relation to the dissolution of Parliament. Some Members who were at the last Ecclesiastical Committee meeting may remember David Cameron’s parliamentary private secretary raising the question of whether we could go back on having the Prime Minister choose between different candidates for bishops. That is a real reassertion of prerogative powers. After the next election we could have a Government with a bare majority—or even without an effective majority—taking executive power and choosing to have an early second election without a parliamentary majority vote, thus increasing popular cynicism about politics as such.

I regret that, in power, the Labour Government have done so little to spread power and wealth and to increase fairness. On democracy and constitutional reform, I do not believe that the current Conservative Party benefits from being a liberal Conservative Party, as David Cameron loves to say. The principles of liberal democracy are, I repeat, to spread power, wealth and income as widely as possible, and we have failed to do that in the United Kingdom over the past several decades.

My Lords, like others who have taken part in this important debate, I thank the noble Lord, Lord Tyler, for tabling this Motion. It has obviously been justified by the number of Peers who have put their names down to speak, even though there seems to be a rather disproportionate representation by the Liberal Democrats.

Many of us think that this country has suffered from rather too much constitutional upheaval over the past 13 years to be hungering for even more. We have had longer statute books and more regulations than ever before. We have also had so-called political reform. We have more proportional representation than ever and thus more electoral confusion than ever. We have also had more electoral fraud than ever.

Many issues of interest have been raised in this debate, but we cannot go on like this. We think that our urgent priority must be to get to grips with our economic, social, employment and educational crises rather than piling a host of further constitutional changes on the upheavals that we have had these past two years, whether in this place or anywhere else.

For 250 years we had an unwritten constitution of unique flexibility that allowed us to accommodate unparalleled economic advance and social change without civil conflict, without revolution and without civil war, alone among all advanced nations. With all the problems facing our country, tearing that up would not have been my top priority. However, that was the choice that the Labour Party made, with the eager support of the Liberal Democrats, who thought, somewhat naively as it proved, that Mr Blair had given them a referendum on PR.

Some of the changes made to our constitution will endure, such as the Scottish Parliament. Others were dead ends, such as the completely unnecessary idea of English regional government. Other changes have proved damaging, such as the overproliferation of unelected advisers in government and the power given to a certain spin doctor to direct civil servants. Our priority will be to pick up the pieces and try to render them coherent, not to knock more of them off the board.

Of course, we understand the Liberal Democrats’ fascination for what they call political reform, or fair voting. Talk of proportional representation attracts noble Lords on those Benches like wasps flock to jam. That is because PR stands not for proportional representation but for permanent representation for the Liberal Democrats. It is a way for the third most popular party to get a permanent stranglehold on political power. I fail to see the logic of that, along with the noble Lord, Lord Grocott, who added a dose of common sense on that subject.

Under the current system, the Labour Party supplanted the Liberal Party in the 1920s. It did so for a simple reason—it was more popular. If the Liberal Democrats were to win enough votes, they could supplant the Labour Party, or even my party, as the second party, and reap the benefits in representation. But in nearly 90 years they have failed to do so for a simple reason—they are not popular enough. I see no urgency in the present crisis in passing legislation to give one party permanent power that the people of Britain have decided, over generations, to withhold.

There have been, and always will be, sensible changes that can be made to our constitution. After all, it was a Conservative Government who introduced life Peers to this place. The Labour Party opposed it. It was a Conservative Government who introduced female Members to this place. The Labour Party opposed it.

We must pay close attention to the non-political parts of the body politic. One of the greatest assets of this country, ever since the Northcote-Trevelyan reforms, has been a skilled, impartial Civil Service—well trained, well trusted and confident enough to warn as well as to advise Ministers on the implications of policy proposals. It has had sound and tried procedures and proper papers, records and minutes, which have served successive Governments well. We also have a cadre of highly trained, professional officers in local government. At both levels, we have seen creeping politicisation in the past 13 years and the erosion of good practice. Whatever else we may agree or disagree about in the debate, I hope that we can all agree that a proper Civil Service Act is something that the Government should have put in place long ago. We must restore the standing and the independence of the Civil Service. It is one of the great institutions of state that balance executive power, along with, for example, the monarchy, an independent judiciary and the established church, which, I assure the right reverend Prelate the Bishop of Ripon, we on these Benches strongly support and wish to see well represented in this House.

Nothing that I have said denies the right of the Executive, as represented by an elected Government deriving their authority from a majority in another place, to pursue their business as mandated. Their authority may be exercised incompetently, wastefully or, at times, arrogantly, as it has been over the past 13 years, but recognition of the authority of the elected House is a fundamental principle of representative democracy. I ask the noble Lord, Lord Tyler, to state clearly whether the Liberal Democrats accept the principles of the Salisbury convention, as set out in the report of the noble Lord, Lord Cunningham, on the conventions of the UK Parliament. This convention has served our Parliament well since 1945. Can we be assured that this is one political and constitutional change that the Liberal Democrats would not make?

My Lords, I congratulate the noble Lord, Lord Tyler, on securing this debate and leading us into a fascinating discussion of a well trodden subject. Some interesting new ideas have been put forward. I also congratulate the noble and learned Lord, Lord Carswell, on his maiden speech. Some noble Lords treated the noble and learned Lord as though he were a new Member of the House, but he has probably been a Member for longer than some of those who congratulated him on becoming a new Member. He had taken the decision not to speak until today, but it was a joy to hear him. Many years ago, when he was Lord Chief Justice of Northern Ireland, he took me round the High Court in Belfast. We enjoyed his speech very much and look forward to hearing from him a lot more in future. I also note that one of the best points made today—it was made by the noble Lord, Lord Alderdice—was that what often goes unsaid is the pure courage that judges and their families in Northern Ireland have had to show over many generations.

Listening to the noble Lord, Lord Tyler, one would have thought that there had been no reforms in the constitutional field for the past 12 years. I know that he knows that that is not true. The noble Lord referred to “13 wasted years”. If he can be so passionate about a reforming Government, I would hate to see the state that he might be in if there happened to be a non-reforming Government. Of course, between 1979 and 1987 the noble Lord was a distinguished Member of the other place. I am sure that he must have taken a great interest in these matters and I wonder what his response was then to a non-reforming Government. I do not think that this is likely, but if by any chance there was to be a Conservative Government in the next five years, I wonder what his attitude would be to them. My feeling is that he would not be as hard on them as he is on us, even though we have been a reforming Government of the first order.

The Government have brought forward major reforms to the constitution, including to your Lordships’ House. The House has played a key role in these reforms, passing many significant pieces of legislation put to it since 1997. The Government have made a reality of devolution. I thought that the noble Lord, Lord Alderdice, was uncharacteristically churlish about the motivation for devolution, although what he said may have been tongue in cheek. We made devolution a reality in Scotland, Wales and Northern Ireland and we established the London Assembly. I was a little surprised at the comment of the noble Lord, Lord Wallace, that we have not spread power. Whatever the motivation may have been, no one can deny that the devolved areas have more power now—it may not be as much as they would like—to conduct their own affairs than they had when we came to office in 1997.

The Human Rights Act has been mentioned. We have embedded that into United Kingdom law. We have created a new Supreme Court, separating the highest appeal court from Parliament. We passed the Political Parties, Elections and Referendums Act 2000, which created the Electoral Commission and introduced a comprehensive regulatory regime for political party and election finance. That Act also set a framework for the conduct of referenda. Further legislation last year strengthened the Electoral Commission better to equip it as an effective regulator, along with other reforms. We have created the Freedom of Information Act, a fundamental measure necessary for increasing the transparency of government—it is sometimes embarrassing to government but it is none the worse for that—therefore reinforcing the ability of concerned citizens to hold this and any future Government to account.

Of course, the noble Lord, the Lord Tyler, would have liked us to have gone further, but I think that he would have to agree that it is a simple and undeniable fact that we are in a different world following this programme of reform. Indeed, what we have achieved has been described by Professor Vernon Bogdanor as a “quiet revolution”—it is quite a well known phrase now. I refer also to a Guardian leader of 19 October, which said that we should,

“look at the last 12 years. Labour’s dispersal of power, had it been set out as a blueprint, would have appeared revolutionary”.

I think, therefore, that noble Lords should just calm down a bit when they consider whether this has been a reforming Government. Of course, noble Lords want more, but they have had a great deal already and there will be plenty more in the next five years, too.

The past nine months have seen the passage of the Parliamentary Standards Act—vital legislation necessary for the creation of an independent body outside Parliament to oversee allowance schemes for Members in another place. They have also seen the introduction of the Constitutional Reform and Governance Bill, currently in Committee in another place. That Bill includes measures that will help to rebuild trust in our democratic and constitutional settlement by reinforcing the principles of probity, transparency and accountability across government. Each part of the Bill contributes to this wider programme of reform. Important amendments to that Bill have recently been tabled to give effect to our commitment that the recommendations of the report on MPs’ expenses and allowances by the Committee on Standards in Public Life should be implemented.

It is important, too, that the Government have now committed to holding a referendum on the alternative vote system early in the next Parliament. I have to say that I am rather more Plant and Rennard than I am Rooker on this point. The Government consider it a crucial step and we hope and expect that the preparations for such a referendum will do a great deal to help the engagement of society in the political process. When a referendum should be held and the merits of various electoral systems are not simple matters. I want to make it clear—there was some doubt on the matter, as the noble Lord, Lord Rennard, was asking me about it—that following considerable reflection the Government have committed to holding a referendum on the alternative vote system early in the next Parliament.

Alternative voting offers voters the chance to express as many preferences as they wish. Where a candidate does not have majority support, these further preferences can determine the outcome. Under AV, therefore, MPs will have broader support than under first past the post and we should see more MPs elected with support from a majority of voters. We believe that the system is the best way to increase the electorate’s stake in their representative, encouraging parties and candidates to reach out beyond their core support while crucially maintaining the essential link between an MP and a single geographical constituency. Speaking personally, I think that that is the most important principle of all.

So far I have mentioned the Government’s initiatives and plans, but there is another, equally important, aspect to political and constitutional reform, which was referred to by many noble Lords in this debate—the noble Lords, Lord Butler and Lord Luce, and the noble Baroness, Lady Murphy, among them. That is reform of Parliament itself. It is the same issue but slightly different. It is a very important issue, although perhaps one that the country understands the least, because it seems so far upstream. I speak of reforms to the procedures and internal workings of this House and of another place.

The report produced by the committee chaired by the honourable Dr Tony Wright has been mentioned frequently in this debate. I am pleased to say that the Leader of the House of Commons has announced that time will be made available on 23 February for Members in another place to debate that important report. We are keen to continue the reforms by taking forward the recommendations contained in the report of the Wright committee, which the Prime Minister of course set up, but the Government’s preference is for these reforms to be agreed on a widely based consensus and taken forward as soon as possible. We are committed to providing time for a debate next month and are proposing 21 specific recommendations for implementation. The report was wide-ranging but not unanimous; indeed, the report from the Liaison Committee of another place showed that there is not unanimity. It is not a question of the Government against the wishes of the other place; we are facilitating the House with an opportunity to come to decisions on it.

Is the Minister suggesting that there will be an opportunity for another place to vote on these 21 proposals seriatim or in any way, or is he saying when he speaks of consensus that they will go through on the nod if no one objects? If the latter proposition is the case, it must be an impossible hurdle for the other place to effect reform along the right lines.

I have gained as much information as I can while sitting here on what was said this morning. I do not want to mislead the noble Lord or the House. I understand that the 21 recommendations will go before the other place; for those that are objected to, the Government are committed to bringing them back to the House in the form of amendable resolutions. My right honourable friend the Leader of the other place said:

“At the point at which they are amendable, any recommendation from the Wright Committee’s report can thereby be attached”.

I do not think that I should say any more about the noble Lord’s pertinent question.

As for reforms of this House’s procedures, the noble Lord, Lord Butler, and others made a strong plea that the equivalent of the Wright committee should be set up here. My reply, I am afraid, is perhaps more “Yes Minister” than it ought to be: it is a matter for the House authorities—I mention to the noble Baroness, Lady Murphy, that they are not quite the same as the usual channels—whether a similar review should be carried out in this House. There is clearly quite a lot of feeling that it should be.

My Lords, will the Minister explain to a rookie what the difference is between the House authorities and the usual channels?

As I said that, I realised that I had probably made a mistake that the noble Lord might well come back at me about. No, I cannot explain the difference. I am sure that, with his experience, he will understand that there probably are some subtle differences, but they are well beyond me.

Comments were made about when provisions of the Political Parties and Elections Act 2009 will be commenced. The noble Lord, Lord Tyler, was particularly annoyed about the provisions not being brought in in due course. I have to point out that that matter, which was discussed by both Houses, was very complicated and we made it clear during the passage of the Bill that it would not be commenced before summer this year. What are the problems? We need to consider further precisely how the system would be enforced, how individuals would verify their tax status, and the roles of the Electoral Commission and Her Majesty’s Revenue and Customs. He will know, though, that there is now an amendment down on the CRAG Bill—not the same amendment, of course, as the provision has already passed into law—that deals with the issue of deeming taxation in Parliament.

I shall deal with a couple of points that were made in relation to the Prime Minister’s Governance of Britain commitments. I have a list of the 12 areas where the Prime Minister, in his speech in the other place on 3 July 2007, pledged to give up executive powers. It would take up too much of the House’s time to read it out but there has been progress on practically every one of those 12 pledges, and we as a Government can be proud of the fact that they are being put into effect.

The noble Lord, Lord Wallace of Tankerness, asked about devolution. He served with distinction on the Calman commission. We think that devolution has been a great success for the past 10 years. We want to make it better and more accountable. Our proposals will set out a new deal. We are committed to bringing forward a single piece of primary legislation as soon as possible in the next Parliament to ensure that people in Scotland have robust legislation, grounded in proper analysis, to deliver this enhanced devolution. As the House will be aware, the Calman recommendations were designed as a package and are being treated as such. Our feeling is that any attempt to cherry pick a small number of recommendations while simply dismissing the vast majority of proposals ignores the deliberations of the commission, evidence-based as it was, and disregards the need to ensure that these recommendations are carefully and coherently introduced.

With regard to Wales, my noble friend Lord Morgan asked what view the Government took of the Jones Parry commission. I argue that we have proved our commitment to devolution in Wales. The Secretary of State for Wales and the First Minister have been working closely together over the past weeks as discussions have continued about a referendum. I understand that the First Minister will be laying a Motion in the Assembly on 2 February to be debated on 9 February. We believe that devolution has also been a success in Wales up to this point.

Among the points that other noble Lords made, the noble Lord, Lord Greaves, made one about local authorities and the importance of town councils. I am proud that I was a mayor of a town council some years ago. It is a very useful unit of local government, in my view. There was the attack, if I may put it like that, in beautiful language from my noble friend Lord Harrison on the role of the Bishops in this House. That was a marked feature of his speech, on which I do not intend to comment. The noble Baroness, Lady Murphy, made her equally articulate attack on the usual channels, while the answer to my noble friend Lord Grocott has to be yes. I dare not say anything else.

In all, this has been a very good and timely debate. It will be interesting to see whether this debate is remembered and acted on after the election. We have put in place major electoral and constitutional reforms, but our work is not completed. There should not be constitutional change for constitutional change’s sake, but it must never be off the agenda and it is certainly not off ours. In this House, we have the power to debate and review the ways in which we work and make proposals to ensure that they are most effective. Today’s debate has moved us forward by giving us the space to reflect carefully and consider the views of our peers. I thank all noble Lords who have taken part, particularly the noble Lord, Lord Tyler, who introduced the debate.

My Lords, I cannot attempt to respond to such an interesting and wide-ranging debate in just a few minutes, but there are one or two issues that I must address very briefly. First, the noble Lord, Lord Luke, asked about the views on these Benches of the issue of the so-called Salisbury/Addison convention. I must refer him to the Joint Committee on Conventions, of which I was a member; paragraphs 105, 107, 109 and 115 are where our attitude is set out in full. I entirely endorse that, and I hope that that deals with that matter.

I want to be absolutely certain, but I think that the Minister said, in his very interesting response—and I am grateful to him—that the Government intend to legislate to hold a referendum in the next Parliament on the issue. Is he shaking his head? Am I to understand that that is not the case?

I did not say that.

Well, my Lords, that puts us in a very difficult position, because given what has been said on all sides of the House about the value of manifesto commitments—and bearing in mind our experience in 1997—I fear that there are major questions still arising from that issue.

This has been a very wide-ranging debate, and I could not expect the Minister to respond to all the points made, but I hope that the Government will look very carefully indeed at Hansard. That is because from all parts of the House there have been really serious contributions on what I regard as a major issue—even if the noble Lord, Lord Grocott, does not—which is the confidence of our fellow citizens in how we operate. I hope that the Minister will therefore look at that again.

From the very interesting speech made by the noble and learned Lord, Lord Carswell, whom I welcome very much to our deliberations—he has obviously had time to examine them with some care—it sounded to me as if he thought that some of my colleagues were dangerous radicals in a great rush. His cautionary tone was very appropriate, but I am reminded that Mr Gladstone was attacked for being an old man in a hurry. Somebody told me today that once you are over the hill, you can accelerate. Well, some of the issues that we have been addressing today have been around with us for many years, and if ever there was something that might be a useful motto for this House, it would be that we could accelerate before this House or, indeed, its individual Members are over the hill.

What I thought particularly interesting in the contribution of the noble and learned Lord, Lord Carswell, was his reference to evolution, evaluation and experimentation. I may be paraphrasing what he was saying about not rushing into things. One of the great experimentations undertaken, over many years, has been the use of the single transferable vote in Northern Ireland, which has been an unqualified success in making sure that people feel that, in that multi-party context, they have a representational system that they can accept. It has gone through some difficult times during the Troubles, but the three ‘e’s in that context—experimentation, evaluation and evolution—are appropriate to today’s discussions. As I set out in my opening speech, there is a real danger that we could end up with a curious result from the coming election: a Conservative Government which is really only a southern England Government. That would be a problem.

With those few words, and with grateful thanks to all who have contributed to the debate, I beg leave to withdraw the Motion.

That this House takes note of the Report of the European Union Committee on Codecision and National Parliamentary Scrutiny.

Relevant Document: 17th Report, Session 2008–09, HL Paper 125.

My Lords, the report and this debate are about ensuring that the House is as well placed as possible to scrutinise the decisions taken by the Government on our behalf in Europe. I put on record my thanks to three successive Ministers for Europe: Caroline Flint, the noble Baroness, Lady Kinnock of Holyhead, and Chris Bryant for their generally constructive approach to our inquiry. Our report made a number of recommendations to improve the scrutiny system, and the Government have already accepted the majority of them. I also express my thanks to the staff in the Foreign and Commonwealth Office and the Cabinet Office who provided very valuable evidence. This, for the first time, put sections of the Government's internal rules on parliamentary scrutiny of European Union proposals into the public domain. I hope that they will be able to make all this guidance public soon.

The report is a thorough analysis of the scrutiny system operated not only in this House but in the Commons. It also looks at whether the system provides effective scrutiny of proposals now decided under the codecision, or ordinary legislative procedure, of the Union. The report is therefore important because almost all European legislation is now negotiated under this procedure. This includes some of the most important legislation currently under consideration, such as the proposed measure on hedge funds.

The headline conclusion is that there are aspects of the ordinary legislative procedure which make it more difficult for us to scrutinise effectively. Our sister committee in the House of Commons has expressed similar concerns in its recent annual report. Other national parliaments are having difficulties, as shown by the written evidence submitted to us which is appended to the report. It is, for example, interesting that the Danish parliament, which has a particular form of mandating, finds this particularly complicated in the circumstances of codecision, and makes that clear in its evidence to us.

We are therefore concerned that negotiations on legislation are conducted for the most part in small, informal and private meetings between representatives of the European Parliament, the rotating Council presidency and the Commission. This makes it hard for us to feed in our views and for the Government to take full account of them.

In the report, we make a number of recommendations to address these difficulties. These aim to ensure, first, that the right information is provided to Parliament at the right time; secondly that the Government have the opportunity to take our views into account before the decision is taken in the Council; and, thirdly, that all government departments work hard to ensure that we are kept informed of the progress of negotiations without the delays that we have unfortunately sometimes experienced in the past. I shall go into this in more detail.

The Treaty of Lisbon has renamed what we have called “codecision” as the ordinary legislative procedure. It is the European Union legislative procedure whereby a proposal from the European Commission is negotiated and adopted jointly by the Council of Ministers and the European Parliament. In practice, it means that, like the situation between the Lords and the Commons here, every word of a legislative procedure must be agreed between the Council and the European Parliament. The process operates somewhat like “ping-pong” on a Westminster Bill, in that as soon as agreement has been found, the process stops. Therefore, although there is discussion in the European Parliament of three readings, in practice, there is only a single reading of a piece of legislation.

Personally, I support the idea that the European Parliament should be on an equal footing with the Council in negotiations on legislation. This provides a valuable counterpoint to the decision reached by the Council and provides additional layers of democratic accountability. In the past where the Council has legislated on its own, there has generally been less transparency. Of course, agreement between the Council and the European Parliament does not happen by accident. It happens because representatives of the rotating Council presidency, European Parliament and Commission meet in a series of small, informal meetings called, in the jargon, informal trialogues. It is in these meetings that the decisions are taken by three key people: the European Parliament's rapporteur for the particular proposal; the representative of the rotating presidency, representing the whole of the Council; and the representative of the commissioner. These meetings are not public and no minutes are published. We heard a great deal of evidence that negotiating legislation in this way presented difficulties, including for national Parliaments.

The European Parliament has also had problems with the arrangements and with the experience of using informal trialogues to make legislation. It has now agreed a code of conduct to try to ensure that agreements are more transparent and not so rushed that there is time for proper consideration within its committees. We welcome this. This code of conduct makes things marginally easier, but two important issues remain. First, the informal and confidential nature of trialogue meetings is still not transparent, and so it is difficult for us to follow negotiations and comment usefully to the Government. Secondly, because the negotiations are conducted by the representative of the rotating presidency on behalf of the Council, it can be difficult for Governments to follow the negotiations and hence to present the views of their national parliaments.

Addressing the difficulties posed by informal trialogues is all the more important because, although the ordinary legislative procedure, as I mentioned, allows for a maximum of three readings of legislation, there has been a trend to seek earlier agreements whenever possible, so much so that in the five years to the 2009 European elections, almost 70 per cent of legislation was adopted after only one reading. In other words, the informal trialogue is now the primary way in which compromises between the Council and the Parliament are obtained for European legislation.

I turn now to how we meet the challenges it poses. Succinctly put, we conclude that for us to conduct effective scrutiny, the Government must provide us with the right information at the right time. Currently, the rules governing what is provided to Parliament are set out in guidance issued by the Cabinet Office. Broadly, this guidance is good, but in the case of legislation negotiated through informal trialogues, it has caused us problems. These problems are set out fully in our report, and I will not take the House's time now to go into them in detail. Suffice it to say that we recommend a number of significant changes to the guidance to stop this happening again. Most importantly, we argue for an update from the Government every time a change with policy implications is agreed or proposed between the Council’s representative and the Parliament. This strengthens the previous requirement for an update only where the change is significant, which is, of course, a matter of opinion. I am happy to report that the Government have agreed to this.

Secondly, we should be provided with all presidency compromise texts, which aim to restart negotiations on a stalled proposal. This is because these are the documents on which the real negotiations take place, and on occasion departments have refused to provide them to us. Again, I am pleased that the Government have agreed. Finally, we should be sent an update in advance of a decision taken by the Council, or by the meeting of ambassadors, to agree to amendments to be proposed by the European Parliament. The Government have agreed to this too.

Unfortunately there are two important points on which we have not yet received answers from the Government, even though our report was published in July last year. First, some of the documents we need for scrutiny are marked “limité” by the European institutions. This is not a classification, but rather a distribution marking indicating that they should not be made publicly available. As a result, the Government do not generally provide such papers to us. However, we took evidence from the Council's legal service that it sees “no problem” with national parliaments being able to access such documents. We know that in other national parliaments scrutiny committees have access to these documents. The Government have yet to commit to providing us with limité documents, even though we have made clear that we need them to be able to scrutinise effectively.

Secondly, as I mentioned earlier, the Government’s internal guidance on provision of European documents to the committee is not currently publicly available. The written evidence to our inquiry is the first time that aspects of the guidance have been made public. We conclude that the whole guidance should be made publicly available. Again, the Government have yet to commit themselves on this. I have given the Minister notice of both these points and I will listen carefully to his reply to hear whether the Government have made their mind up on them.

I turn now to one further point which came out of the inquiry: the differences between how well departments deal with parliamentary scrutiny of European proposals. Some departments have excellent records. Unfortunately, however, our experience is that some departments do not. Documents are provided late, or sometimes not at all. This can lead to Ministers reaching agreement in the Council where there has been no parliamentary oversight. This is a serious matter. In the future my committee will be active in seeking oral explanations from Ministers or Permanent Secretaries whose departments do not fulfil their obligations to Parliament. I am sure that your Lordships will agree to this more rigorous approach.

I conclude with some reflections on the relationship between my committee and Members of the European Parliament. The primary purpose of parliamentary scrutiny of European affairs is, and will remain, holding the Government to account for the agreements they reach in the council. However, increasingly we have detected from MEPs interest in our reports and conclusions. For example, Arlene McCarthy MEP, then chair of the European Parliament’s internal market committee, told us in evidence to our inquiry that she had found a report from Sub-Committee G useful when her committee discussed the proposed timeshare directive. Indeed, she tabled amendments taken directly from our report.

Following this report, we will seek to make the results of our scrutiny available to MEPs working on particular negotiations. This will be in addition to making my correspondence with Ministers available on the internet. In this connection, I should mention the regular meetings which my committee holds with UK MEPs and our sister committee in the Commons. There are three meetings each year: one in the Lords, one in the Commons and one in Brussels. They are valuable opportunities to exchange views on current legislative proposals with MPs and MEPs.

I take this opportunity to thank the noble Lord, Lord Sewel, and the noble and learned Lord, Lord Mance, who chaired the committee during this inquiry, as I was absent for medical reasons. I beg to move.

My Lords, it is always a great delight but also, I am afraid, a matter of some despair to follow the noble Lord, Lord Roper, in a debate: delight because he comprehensively covers the subject, but despair because he comprehensively covers the subject so that there is little else to say. However, as I remember, that has never inhibited Members of your Lordships’ House, and I intend to follow that precedent.

It is clear that the treaty of Lisbon essentially tried to deliver many things but two in particular: to enhance the role of national parliaments in the affairs of the Union while, at the same time, developing further the role of the European Parliament through the adoption of codecision-making as the normal method of decision-making. The difficulty was that that inevitably produced a few paradoxes and stresses. Sometimes, the explicit values seem to go in one direction and behaviour goes in another. So we have an emphasis on the value of transparency but there is also the practice of informal trialogues, which makes transparency particularly difficult.

Those are the challenges in ensuring that we proceed with a form of decision-making in the EU that enables national parliaments to play a full and proper role. Quite honestly, it will need to be worked at by national parliaments, but it will also need to be worked at by the Governments of member states so as to enable national parliaments to carry out their scrutiny role properly and thoroughly.

As we look at decision-making in the EU, how do we see it developing? The noble Lord, Lord Roper, has already spelt out the main features that we have now identified. There is an emphasis on First Reading and early Second Reading decisions, and a speeding-up of decision-making as the rotating presidency comes towards the end of its six-month period. Those are stresses or difficulties that we, as parliamentarians in national parliaments, have to confront if we are to do our scrutiny role properly and adequately. The danger is that things go below the radar and are not properly identified, and that there is insufficient time to assess the merits of a proposal.

If we are to succeed, we will do so in partnership with the departments. Again, as the noble Lord, Lord Roper, said, it is essential that departments keep the Select Committee and its sub-committees informed virtually immediately the policy changes develop and as compromise text becomes identified. To repeat what the noble Lord, Lord Roper, said, I am afraid that in the past there have been occasions when that degree of communication has not been established as properly and effectively as it should be. The danger now is that the consequences of not having that sort of communication are very much greater, as I hope will be recognised.

I say in parenthesis that I speak in this context as the former chair of Sub-Committee D, which deals with agriculture. Of course, agriculture is one area that has come fully into the codecision process for the first time. I know nothing about the pesticides regulation but the record of Defra, even without codecision-making, was, I say with some generosity, somewhat patchy. It has a real challenge and I am sure that it will rise to it.

We have to recognise that scrutiny has evolved within this House. Two types of scrutiny take place. Routine scrutiny is where a sub-committee receives a communication, looks at it, assesses it and passes it back through correspondence with the department. That routine, day-to-day scrutiny focuses on scrutinising the Government and on their reaction and response. A slightly different type of scrutiny, with a slightly different emphasis, has developed and that is scrutiny which flows from the pretty exhaustive inquiries and reports which come before your Lordships' House. That scrutiny has moved beyond just holding the Government to account and scrutinising them; it goes into the area of trying to influence policy at the European level directly.

Until now, we have developed reasonable mechanisms to ensure that the Commission is aware of the views of the committee and the arguments and the evidence which have been brought forward in sub-committee hearings. However, we have not developed very well any real link with MEPs and with the committees of the European Parliament. We still have some work to do in that area and there is an opportunity there to come up with some innovative thinking on how to get the work and the value which goes into these reports into the decision-making process.

Finally, I return to limité. I wish the Minister could help us to clear this up. We know that many departments now come to sub-committee meetings with limité documents and go through them quite openly with members of the sub-committee. We know that in some member states the national parliaments put limité documents on their websites. We know from the evidence that we received in Brussels that there is no objection at that end to limité documents being made available to committees. So can we just get on and do it?

My Lords, I do not think that anyone would disagree that today it is more important than ever to ensure effective scrutiny of European legislation. The reason it is more important than ever—I do not say that just as a cliché—relates to the number of policy areas which are subject to what we must now call the ordinary legislative procedure. They have been increased by the Lisbon treaty. It is not surprising that the report we are debating today into the existing pattern of scrutiny has recommended a number of detailed changes to the present arrangements.

I congratulate the committee and the noble Lord, Lord Roper, on the great care taken in considering the changes and making recommendations and practical suggestions about what should be done to take account of them. I also congratulate the Government on the constructive way in which they have responded to the report. Anyone who has read the correspondence between the noble Lord, Lord Roper, and the Minister, in all fairness, would have to come to that conclusion. Reading the exchange of correspondence since the report, one sees what I suppose would be called an iterative process; put more colloquially, the committee has squeezed and, without squeezing too hard, has got most of the juice out of this orange.

As was pointed out in the last letter in the correspondence and reiterated by the noble Lord, Lord Roper, two outstanding issues are left. One is the publishing of the scrutiny guidance; the second is the provision of limité documents. Coming to this afresh—or perhaps I should say after a decent interval of a decade—it seems to me that there is no valid reason for withholding the scrutiny guidance, or providing the limité documents, perhaps with certain safeguards. It may be, knowing the ways of government, as most people in this House do, that the Government have held up these two little prizes for presentation in this debate. The final fruits of the work of the committee may be greeted with success at the conclusion of the debate. I hope that that is so, because I cannot see any justification for not giving them.

In a sense, I have sympathy with both sides of the argument. It is obviously important for effective scrutiny that information should be properly and adequately supplied, and that it should be supplied in a timely fashion. No useful purpose would be served by ensuring just an academic, backward-looking analysis. The information should be provided in time for comment and criticism before the final government decision on the legislation. The report rightly points out that the use of informal trialogues—that is to say, small, private meetings between representatives of the Council, the Commission and the European Parliament—which may have increased, makes that more difficult to achieve. However, that process—the use of the informal trialogues—is inevitable as a way of reaching agreement in reasonable time. Things move fast, and have to move fast.

All I say from my experience as a Commissioner is that when Parliaments tie down their Governments totally in advance and remove flexibility, that does not result in a better outcome for the country concerned. Denmark is of course the locus classicus where that happens. Sometimes, countries are unable to negotiate in a nimble and dextrous way if they are tied down by a rigid parliamentary mandate, which makes them less effective partners with their colleagues in working out the final legislative solution.

Our system is a long way from that, but one can understand Governments—any Government—not wanting, by conceding too much, to get closer to the Danish position. It is boring but true to say that we need the right balance. I believe that the process of push and pull between the committee and the Government has updated that balance in the light of changing circumstances and should improve the scrutiny process. I should say that it will improve the scrutiny process; it would be churlish to say just that it should. I was going to say that it should significantly improve it, but the correspondence shows that in this context “significantly” and “substantially” have special meanings which are viewed with deep suspicion, so I shall leave it by omitting adverbs and say only that I welcome the improvements that have arisen and will arise from that iterative process.

My Lords, I welcome this interesting and significant report, which seems to me to mark a further stage in the evolution of the Lords committee structure, which is welcome, while recognising how the gradual expansion of our committees has contributed over the past 30 years or so to transforming the role of this House. I feel some of the history of the EU Committee, because when I first came to the House, the Clerk of Parliaments, Michael Wheeler-Booth, would like to remind people that he had been the first Clerk to the European Communities Committee, and one of his first witnesses had been a rather nervous young woman whose nerves he had strengthened before she gave evidence by giving her a double gin and tonic. That was my wife.

I have seen the evolution of that committee, which was rather small to start with and dealt with a limited amount of legislation. With the Lisbon treaty, a not insignificant treaty in terms of a number of changes, we see the competences of the European Parliament extended and widened over a number of areas from which it was previously excluded, and this House has to adjust again. I simply mark something that many Conservatives are reluctant to accept, which is that as the United Kingdom has more and more to negotiate the basis of national policy in collaboration with others through various international forums, Ministers and officials are necessarily making compromises and necessary trade offs and offering concessions, and that potentially makes it harder for the usual forms of domestic accountability to be maintained. When it comes to climate change negotiations and to a range of international organisations—even to NATO—it is very difficult for us to find out what is going on and to keep abreast of it. In the European Union, we have more chance of keeping abreast of what is happening than most and, in this respect, the European Parliament is an ally rather than a competitor.

I spent much of yesterday in the rather overgrand and unnecessarily fancy buildings of the European Parliament, and I had my usual mixed feelings about them but, in some ways, the European Parliament is a real parliament that conducts real negotiations of the sort that our Executive-dominated political system does not allow the British Parliament to do very often. There is detailed discussion and negotiation. I sat in briefly on a discussion between a number of MEPs and one of the nominees for the Commission, who was a replacement for a nominee who had already withdrawn. Unfortunately, I missed Madeleine Albright giving evidence to a European Parliament committee.

The European Parliament is a serious institution with which we should be co-operating as far as possible. The report recognises that there are formal processes, but also informal processes that we have to try to grapple with. That is true of all politics, including what happens in this House. What happens in the Chamber is concerted very effectively by what we all do in our offices and in corridors between times. We need to work more closely with other national parliaments and with the European Parliament formally and informally. That means that the British Parliament’s liaison office in Brussels will become increasingly important to us, and many of us would like to know a little more about how it operates and how it feeds into the committee structure. It means that we should be better informed about exchanges with other parliaments, not only through COSAC but through the meetings that now take place between committee chairs of various sectoral committees in different national parliaments and in both Chambers here, so that we are aware of what is happening.

I am always pleased to discover how high the reputation of our committees is elsewhere in the European Union. I spoke at a small dinner last night and was introduced to the Secretary-General of the European Parliament, who immediately began to cite several useful committee reports from this House, which he had found valuable in feeding back into reports. I have had the same experience when visiting other national parliaments. We now face the delicate task of maintaining the broader, wider and necessarily selective role that characterises the Lords committee and, at the same time, monitoring shifts in proposals as they work through this rather complex process. That carries implications for staffing and for the workload of committee and sub-committee chairs which I hope will be borne in mind by the usual channels or the House authorities, whether they are the same thing or different; we heard about this in the previous debate. The implications need to be taken into account as we carry on through.

There are also implications for our links with other parliaments, with the European Parliament, and in particular with the British members of the European Parliament. Paragraphs 103 and 104 of the report are particularly useful in that regard. I was not aware of how formal the links now are. There is a trialogue between the Commons scrutiny committee, our committee and our MEPs, which is excellent. I was engaged in a number of informal conversations with British MEPs from my own party group in Brussels yesterday which I find extremely helpful, just as I do when I talk to Liberal members of other national parliaments; I find out what is going on and exchange ideas. I regret that the Conservatives have become a more marginal force in the European Parliament, which makes it much more difficult for them to benefit from the same sort of exchanges.

This is a very valuable and significant report, and I hope that the House authorities will think through what the long-term implications for the operations of the Lords committee will be.

My Lords, the first page of the report notes that,

“interest in this House in our report may well be limited to those serving on our Committee and sub-committees”.

That is unnecessarily modest. We in UKIP, at least, are always interested in evidence-based demonstrations of how weakened Parliament has become, and how power has drained, is draining and will continue to drain away from Westminster to the EU apparat in Brussels. This is confirmed repeatedly in the report, which goes into considerable detail to show how frustrating and difficult it is for the EU Select Committee and its sub-committees to fulfil their mandate.

One brief illustration of this amused me: Sub-Committee E’s submission in answer to question 3:

“How does the Sub-Committee keep updated on progress in negotiations at each stage in the codecision procedure? We would normally do this informally, through contact at officials level, but also through the aforementioned requests to be kept informed … Is this effective? No”.

Its answer to question 4—

“At each stage of the codecision procedure, does the Sub-Committee have access to the right documents to ensure that it is able to scrutinise effectively?”—

was, “No”.

Obviously there is a serious problem here.

The report takes us through some of the tortuous procedures of Brussels bureaucracy that give rise to these problems. It has useful jargon-buster boxes to tell us how to navigate our way through the labyrinth and what is meant by first and second readings and by the oddly named “trialogues”. These trialogues seem to consist of a representative of the relevant European Parliament committee, a member of the Commission and the presidency: a sort of mini politburo.

Here I draw on the report of the European Scrutiny Committee of another place. Its most recent report, which was published on 6 January this year after the report by the noble Lord, Lord Roper, underlines the fact that no other member state is present at the “trialogue”, so not only is it difficult for Governments to follow the course of trialogue negotiations and to express their views but:

“it is well nigh impossible for national parliaments to do so at any appropriate point”.

The report goes on to say that neither the Council nor the European Parliament may change a text once it is agreed at one of these informal trialogues, and that the European Scrutiny Committee is not informed of trialogue changes until it is too late: once the negotiations are complete. This is no doubt what the Government refer to when, in their letter to the report, they unblushingly write:

“The report ... will I hope dispel some of the myths that the EU is not democratically accountable”.

Quite.

On democratic accountability, perhaps the Government should have looked at some of the evidence in the report. The noble Baroness, Lady Symons, took part in the examination of Richard Corbett MEP. I have always had a rather soft spot for the noble Baroness and I am sorry that she is not here. She once gave a poker-faced defence of the right of the Commission to legislate on the height and specifications of rocking horses. She was very good at that and she is very good now. On page 68 of the evidence, she said:

“We have gone through this enormously complex edifice and at every point my heart sinks as I recognise the dilution of the relationship between the electors and the decision takers ... but my goodness, you can see why people look at it and think “This is just not representing me. When I put my cross in that box, this was not what I meant, that this whole edifice would be elected”.

The noble Baroness, Lady Symons, is absolutely right and has got it in one. People in this country want their elected MPs to make the laws that they have to obey, the laws that govern them. Elected MPs at least can be held to account by parliamentary scrutiny and at the ballot box. But that just cannot happen with European legislation which is born in Brussels, as the EU Select Committee and the Commons Scrutiny Committee make painfully clear. Is it surprising that people are getting increasingly and demonstrably frustrated and fed up with that sort of legislative process? That is one of the reasons—not the only reason, of course—why UKIP did so well in the European elections when it defeated the Government and the Liberal Democrats.

Let us be clear: even if all the requests of the Government made in the report and in the speech made by the noble Lord, Lord Roper, were met—if documents arrived earlier, if committees were kept abreast of the secretive behind-the-doors deal-making in the trialogues, and if they were allowed sight of the limité documents—it would make very little difference. Scrutiny is only worth while if the scrutineers have teeth.

But national parliaments and their scrutiny committees are toothless tabbies. They cannot do anything about EU legislation. As the Commons Scrutiny Committee report makes clear, reminding those of us who need reminding that the so-called extra power for national parliaments under the Lisbon treaty will make no practical difference whatever to the current position—that is, impotence. The report also points out that under the Lisbon treaty’s yellow and orange card procedures,

“the legislative decision on subsidiarity would continue to rest with the EU institutions”.

The noble Lord, Lord Sewel, was rather optimistic about that.

So far, so bad; but it gets worse. The scrutiny reserve is the bluntest of blunt knives. Eighteen months ago, in response to my Oral Question on the scrutiny reserve, the Government admitted to using the scrutiny override 435 times in four years. In spite of their promises to do better, according to the Commons report, the scrutiny override is still alive and well and living at Westminster.

I am left with the conclusion that this report and the Commons report are just bleating about the consequences of Parliament’s deliberate actions. After all, successive Governments and successive Parliaments have repeatedly signed away powers to Brussels—the Single European Act, the Maastricht treaty, the Amsterdam treaty, the Nice treaty and the Lisbon treaty masquerading as the constitution. They all had parliamentary approval. There was an opportunity for a referendum on the Maastricht treaty, but it was lost. There was a promise of a referendum on the constitution, but when that was brought back as the Lisbon treaty the Government welched on their promise.

So if Parliament and its scrutiny committees have a problem with parliamentary scrutiny, they must look in the mirror to see the source of that problem. Until Parliament reclaims its full powers these problems, which are set out clearly in this report, will remain and, I believe, will get worse. Your Lordships know that there is only one way to reclaim these powers. As a Eurorealist thorn in this bed of Europhile roses, they will know what that course is. I commend it most warmly to them.

My Lords, although I am now a member of the European Union Select Committee, I was not a member at the time the report was produced; I am therefore free to congratulate not only the chairman but the committee on producing a report which contains important recommendations and proposals for enhancing effective security of matters subject to co-decision, or ordinary legislative procedure as we must now call it. It is also an extremely useful handbook and explanation of that procedure.

The noble Lord, Lord Roper, has already explained to the House the contents of the report and indicated where the Government stand to date. The outstanding issues have already been referred to by the noble Lord, Lord Roper, and by my noble friend Lord Brittan of Spennithorne. As to the outstanding issues raised by the committee—namely, the publication of the Cabinet Office guidance on scrutiny and the provision of the so-called limité documents—like other speakers I urge the Minister to tell the House that these issues can be resolved positively in favour of the committee’s recommendations and suggestions.

It is extraordinary that the Government should have any doubts about publishing the scrutiny guidance—not the documents to which it is subject but the scrutiny guidance. Everyone in Parliament and the public should know exactly the parameters in which we work. As to the limité documents, we know that those are made available to other parliamentary committees by other Governments, as has been made clear today. Two selective answers from one of the committee’s witnesses show how misleading the designation may be. In answer to the noble and learned Lord, Lord Mance, in questions 213 and 215, the director of the Council Legal Service said:

“It is not a classification in the sense that it means the document is restricted, secret or confidential”.

Later he said:

“Limité is not confidential, it is not immediately accessible to the public”.

To be fair, the witness also chose to justify in his answers the use of the designation and suggested that it was used only in certain cases where it was believed disclosure would undermine the Council’s decision-making process.

We understand that point. In a report of the committee on the access to documents regulations, the need to be able to negotiate and receive candid advice was recognised. However, we are talking about general publication, effective parliamentary scrutiny and the need for Parliaments to have all the material necessary to do the job of scrutiny properly. The use of the designation ought to be the exception rather than the rule.

Similarly, the ability of our Brussels office to have access to Council documents so that we can respond quickly to the possibly changing situation during the co-decision procedure is important. The new process will be a learning curve for all concerned. I welcome the Government’s proposals that we should be updated on policy changes and that judgments will not be made about what is or is not significant. However, I put in a plea which may be of potentially greater concern to the Sub-Committee on the Law and Institutions, which I chair, than to other sub-committees. In the areas with which we are concerned the policy may be agreed and not changed during the passage of the legislation, but the details could be extremely important.

For example, the Commission is proposing to recast and strengthen the existing directive on combating late payments in commercial transactions; a fresh directive is proposed. The policy thrust—to reduce late payments—will remain the same but the detail may prove critical. I am sure that that will prove the case in other proposals which may come forward under the Stockholm programme. I urge the Government to be flexible and sensitive in assessing what may be a matter for parliamentary scrutiny, and perhaps exercise a judgment in terms of detail as to what is significant, because we must be alive to what is going on.

This brings me to my final point. The noble Lord, Lord Willoughby de Broke, accused the committee of bleating. However, it seems to me that it is UKIP which is doing the bleating and the committee is making substantive and constructive proposals as to how scrutiny by this Parliament can be improved in the light of the Lisbon treaty. I appreciate that some may consider that this involvement of the European Parliament in making laws which affect the United Kingdom is to be regretted—if not deplored—but that is not the subject of this evening’s debate; nor is it the real world because we are not going to withdraw from the European Union.

We need to recognise that we are now presented with opportunities to be involved and to influence the making of European legislation, and we ought to embrace those opportunities with enthusiasm. We need to demonstrate a willingness to work with colleagues in the European Parliament to ensure that, as early as possible, they, as well as Her Majesty’s Government and the Commission, know the views of the UK Parliament. I believe that in the European Parliament there exists a desire to work with national parliaments, and it is reciprocated in other national parliaments.

This week, the internal market committee held a hearing on the late payments directive to which I referred earlier. Seventeen parliaments from across the Union were present to discuss an issue which, while important, is something of a specialist interest. They all contributed to the debate, while others had submitted written evidence. The committee rapporteur, at what was an early stage in the process through the European Parliament, saw that on a number of issues there was a common concern by national parliamentarians across the Union; likewise, national parliamentarians with concerns found that they were shared by parliamentarians from other countries.

We have to create an atmosphere whereby this Parliament does not bleat but deals with European legislation as mainstream business, not something alien with which we would prefer not to be concerned. If we have the opportunity to have more influence on events, we must take it. If we have the opportunity to know more about what is happening and why, then rather than complaining after the event, we must show our citizens that, far from being spectators of the process, we are fully engaged as participants on their behalf.

My Lords, it was a privilege to serve on the committee which worked on this report. I express my particular appreciation to the noble Lord, Lord Roper, for the way in which he introduced this report this afternoon and to his colleagues, the noble and learned Lord, Lord Mance, and the noble Lord, Lord Sewel, for participating in chairing the committee.

This report is very timely, the more so because of the coming into effect of the Lisbon treaty; it had not been finally ratified when the committee was considering matters of codecision, now described as an ordinary legislative procedure. It is not simply a change of name; it is a considerable extension of the democratic process of deliberation at the European level, involving as it does justice and home affairs issues. Consequently, it is of great importance that national parliaments consider how they will seek to influence the particular direction of legislation.

At this stage there is perhaps no need to reiterate precisely the recommendations made by the committee but it is appropriate to thank the Government for their positive response to so many of the committee’s requests. I refer to updating the committees every time there is a policy change, bearing in mind the point of the noble Lord, Lord Bowness, that the detail is as important as the general direction of the change. It is also helpful to know that the presidency compromise texts will be made available, as will any amendments contemplated by the Government.

I heard the legal adviser to the Council indicating that there was no objection to limité documents being circulated. I hope that we can speed up the process within government and that perhaps that will be recognised at the end of this debate. It is unduly cautious to withhold information which is listed on websites by other national parliaments.

Perhaps the most difficult issue which the committee unearthed was how to extend the impact of its thinking on legislation to other national parliaments and to the European Parliament. There are obvious complexities in that, with 26 other national parliaments to be considered and multiple committees. The bureaucratic or institutional complexities of exchanging such information could be quite considerable. I would not propose that we get too bogged down in that. The onus seems to lie firmly with the European Parliament to come up with suggestions about timing and when it would like to hear from national parliaments. Otherwise, we can rest on our laurels and recognise that the reports of the committee and its sub-committees are valued and widely perceived at the European level to be helpful, constructive and direction-oriented.

It also seems to me that the European Parliament has at least as much interest as this House in being made aware of internal debates in a transparent fashion. In the consideration of the constitutional settlement at the European level, a lot of attention was paid to the importance of the Council’s proceedings, when it acts in a legislative capacity, being as transparent and open as possible. If the trialogue process which has been developed, and on which there seems to be a greater reliance, is not to be opened up, it has at least to be conducted in such a way as to allow time for consideration of the arguments being put forward. The European Parliament’s interests cannot be fully or adequately represented merely by the presence of a rapporteur at such a gathering. I hope that the European Parliament will as speedily as possible address the staging of the legislative process, focusing sharply on the trialogue. There would normally be advantage in there being a staged process, with a certain amount of time being preallocated to each reading and each stage, so that national parliaments throughout the European Union are aware of what is happening and what should happen. Sometimes there will be an urgent need to move rapidly but, more often than not, European legislation is not a response to an emergency but a deliberative process which seeks to improve the law across the whole Union.

My Lords, I shall intervene briefly in this debate on what might at first seem a rather dry and process-driven report, because it covers matters of considerable underlying importance for this House’s scrutiny of draft EU legislation. The entry into force at the beginning of last month of the Lisbon treaty brings all these issues into sharper focus and gives them added urgency.

The first point to make is that the Lisbon treaty considerably extends the fields of EU policy that fall subject to codecision and in which thus the capacity for the European Parliament to influence EU draft legislation is enhanced. This is particularly the case with respect to agriculture and fisheries, where the abolition of the old distinction between different forms of expenditure has that effect, and to the fields of justice and home affairs, where the move to qualified majority voting has a similar effect. We will need to ensure that the departments that are in the lead on these subjects, Defra and the Home Office, which have not always in the past been gold medallists in applying scrutiny procedures, are prompt and full in their handling of these procedures where codecision now applies. I hope that the Minister can tell us that proper Cabinet Office guidance has been issued to all departments covered by this extension of codecision.

This extension also underlines the importance of strengthening the links between this House and its EU Committee and sub-committees on the one hand and the European Parliament and its committees and Members on the other, and with other national parliaments. If we are to exert any real influence on legislation, subject to codecision, we must not delude ourselves into thinking that giving our views on draft legislation to our own Government is sufficient. We need to ensure that our views reach the key players in the European Parliament, in particular committee chairs and rapporteurs. That will require more work by our representative in Brussels, to whom the noble Lord, Lord Wallace, referred. It surely adds another argument against any weakening of our links with Members of the European Parliament such as would have occurred if we had simply acquiesced in the other place’s policy of withdrawing Palace of Westminster passes from them.

The other key issue highlighted by the report is the extent to which co-operation in the codecision procedures between the Council and the presidency and the European Parliament is often shortening and truncating the laborious shuttle procedures involved in codecision. I have to confess that I am a little less critical of that development than some others who have spoken, but it does mean that we will have to become more nimble and prompt in reaching views ourselves on draft legislation if we are not to be marginalised in the process. We may welcome or regret this acceleration of codecision procedures, but this trend is not in our gift, so we will need to learn to live with it.

The Government’s responses to our recommendations, as others have said—and I shall offer some praise, too—have been broadly, reasonably positive, if a little grudging. I welcome their acceptance of a number of our proposals. It is good that the weasel words, “significant and substantive”, to which the noble Lord, Lord Brittan, drew attention and which were a wonderful provision behind which the bureaucracy could shelter, in true “Yes Minister” style, are now to be removed from the lexicon of interdepartmental guidance and that the sole criterion for the need to update us will be if any development that takes place in Brussels has policy implications. I should also welcome the Minister’s confirmation that we will in future receive documents that are marked “limité”, thus putting us on all fours with a number of other national legislatures such as the Finnish and Danish Parliaments and the French senate. This should have happened long ago, given that the term limité is not a security classification as such—but better late than never.

I shall add one or two remarks about the intervention of the noble Lord, Lord Willoughby de Broke, who referred to a question from the noble Baroness, Lady Symons, which she put to Mr Corbett. It was a slight pity that he did not enlighten the House of Mr Corbett’s reply. The loss of Mr Corbett to the European Parliament to the benefit of the British National Party at the elections last June was one of the saddest aspects of that occasion, along with the very low level of turnout.

In reply to the question that the noble Lord quoted, Mr Corbett said:

“Of course when you are dealing with complex legislation of the sort that you also want expertise and input, just as happens at the national level when a government drafts a bill and consults and puts it to Parliament and there are debates and discussions, if it is a complex matter and there are lots of inputs from outside and then compromises are made. That whole process indeed can be complex and, certainly at European level, equally, if not more so, because there are more Member States and more diversity to be accommodated”.

As usual with Richard Corbett, I thought that was an admirably honest but also clear reaction to the question that was put to him.

The other remark that I would make about the intervention of the noble Lord, Lord Willoughby de Broke, is that he seemed to display an extraordinary lack of confidence in his colleagues in the European Parliament. After all, his party is much better represented in the European Parliament than it is in this one. Why is he so sure that they can have no effect at all on European legislation, to which he made no reference whatever, and why therefore are they drawing their salaries, taking their seats and—dare I say it above a whisper in case his leader hears this?—acquiring rights to pensions that will no doubt yoke them for ever to the federalist cart that is dragging us all to damnation?

In reply to that interjection —this is nothing at all to do with the report, of course—they are elected, they are doing their best and, like other MEPs from other parties, they are drawing the same expenses and pensions.

I am delighted that the noble Lord says that they are like others; the noble Lord who leads his party has often suggested that drawing a pension from the European Union makes you different from others. I will treasure that remark. I hope that they will have a successful influence in the European Parliament, which is part of this report because the whole of the report was devoted to codecision and how we can help to influence a process in which the European Parliament has a greater say than it had in the past. It is an integral part of that, and I look forward with interest to see how UKIP’s members fare in the months and years ahead.

In conclusion, one hears much talk about moves to strengthen our own parliamentary scrutiny procedures if there were to be a change of Government following the election. We shall no doubt have to wait and see whether that materialises and, if so, in what form, but it is surely important that we put our existing procedures to full use, which this report and this debate are designed to assist. If we do not do that, then talk of “changed procedures” is little more than political posturing.

My Lords, I have huge fellow feeling with the noble Lord, Lord Sewel. He explained the difficulty of following the noble Lord, Lord Roper; I have the difficulty of following the noble Lord, Lord Hannay of Chiswick. It is Scylla and Charybdis: repetition is boring, but by definition anything not said by the noble Lord, Lord Hannay, cannot be worth saying.

I want to make three analytical points, which I think are quite big points, and then three small ones at the end. The nature of the European Parliament is changing quite fast. It began as a debating chamber, a place of resolutions, often on issues in which the then European Community had no role. It is turning rather rapidly into a serious legislature. The next step is what is just happening now with agriculture, fisheries and most of the Third Pillar—the interior, justice, law and home affairs sections—coming under codecision.

Codecision is becoming the normal method, applying to 90 per cent of EU legislation. That is a good thing. Loose talk about the democratic deficits was never more than loose talk; the Council consists of the representatives of the elected Governments of the member states and is entirely democratically legitimate. Yet the democratic legitimacy of the process is undoubtedly enhanced by having the results of their negotiations tested by a directly elected and efficient parliamentary legislature. That is my first point; it is good news. We are dealing with the consequences for us of a development which is benign. I am determined to be both brief and benign in these remarks; benign will be my watchword throughout.

It is a good development, but it all takes rather a long time. In the report there is an authoritative table, on page 87, provided by the Council Secretariat, which shows that the average time taken for a legislative proposal to move from the Commission’s original proposal through to a final agreement is about three years—years, not months. That must make the EU legislative process one of the most measured and deliberate in the world, which is probably a good thing in principle, but hardly practical. It does not make for efficiency. There is a sort of balance to be struck here, and three years seems a bit too long.

It is not surprising, then, that dialogue between the Council and Parliament and an abbreviated procedure, with agreement at First Reading after about only one year, is increasingly being used. The same table shows about one year for legislation that goes through codecision and is agreed at First Reading. One year is not ludicrously rapid, and we need not criticise the European Parliament and the Council for speeding up the process in that way. Indeed, it seems to me to be a second good thing. The Council Secretariat’s table suggests that more than half—indeed, more than two-thirds—of legislation is now being settled in that way, by a deal between the institutions at First Reading. That seems to me very good.

So, as we look at the complications for our process of scrutiny, we need to bear in mind that they arise as the result of two major advances: a democratic advance and an efficiency advance. My third point—which is, again, strictly analytical—is that as the European Parliament becomes a mature legislature, it is clear that it is not going to follow our Westminster model, but one much closer to the American model, the US Congress. On Capitol Hill, legislative debate in plenary session in the Senate or the House is set-piece theatre, for the most part. The real political work is done in committees. So it is at Strasbourg. Plenary debate is becoming much less important in the Parliament, and it is the committees that count. On Capitol Hill, the key to legislative influence is to capture the chairmanship of the key committees. So it is at Strasbourg: the rapporteurs who represent the Parliament in the trialogue with the Council and the Commission hold the real legislative power.

It follows that there is a strong United Kingdom interest in British MEPs holding those jobs, which tend to be allocated in discussions between the big political families—the EDG, the EPP, the Liberals. Personally, as an analyst, I am puzzled that any great UK political party should choose to break its family ties at Strasbourg. Break-up means losing influence on EU legislation. I observe—again, in a wholly analytical, benign and apolitical spirit—that the reasons appear to be ideological, or perhaps theological, and therefore impervious to practical arguments of the kind I am advancing. I have to say, as benignly as I can manage, that such a rigid commitment to legislative impotence seems inimical to the UK interest. I quite understand why UKIP would not want to play much part in EU legislation. The noble Lord, Lord Willoughby de Broke, was eloquent in his disdain for the process and the product. I find it harder to see why the party of Plumb, Brittan, Howell, Soames, Major or Thatcher should adopt a position which, in effect if not in intention, seems to go in the same direction.

That is the end of my apolitical, benign analysis. I now turn to three minor issues, on two of which I can be brief because they have already been well covered. First, the limité issue is a nonsense. I hope that the Minister will confirm that the House will be allowed to see limité documents.

Secondly, we lag behind the Scandinavian parliaments, the French Sénat, the French Assemblée, the Bundestag and the Bundesrat in access to Council documents on the progress of codecision negotiations. These are quite important if we are going to hold the Government to their promise to keep us informed about the progress of a codecision negotiation. Our report suggests at paragraph 88 that this should be remedied. I hope that the Minister can tell us tonight that it will be.

Finally, on the rules of the scrutiny game, there is an existential absurdity in not publishing the guidance. The purpose of scrutiny is to ensure that our interpretation of the public interest is fed into the Government at all stages. The Government have nothing to hide. The rules of the game are being improved. We are content that, provided the rules are properly applied, our concerns will be set at rest. I cannot see why it should be difficult to publish the guidance. It is a small absurdity, but I am sure that it is absurd. I hope that the Minister will agree tonight that it can be put right.

My Lords, after those words, I am glad that the noble Lord, Lord Kerr of Kinlochard, was fittingly inserted into the speakers list as a full speaker rather than accidentally in the gap because of what may have been an administrative slip in the Government Whips Office; if that is not correct, I apologise to them. The noble Lord was inevitably repetitive, because most speakers in this debate are inevitably saying similar things, with the honourable exception of the noble Lord, Lord Willoughby de Broke, in the corner over there, who had a somewhat different view from that of most of the other contributors. It is bound to be repetitive, but there is no harm in that or any need to apologise.

I think of the historical context of how all this has developed since the early days. Forgive me—reminiscing can be very tedious if it goes back too far. I vividly remember working—at a very humble level, I hasten to add—with the then new Prime Minister Edward Heath on various plans to join the Community and setting up our parliamentary delegation and representation in the European Assembly. Edward Heath, with his usual dark, gothic humour, said, “I want to punish you by sending you to Strasbourg for a few years”. My response was, “Please, not too long. I have only just arrived in the House of Commons and I want to concentrate on this place as well”.

However, I accepted the dual mandate in the incredibly weak European Assembly of those days. It had 184 members in an awful utility-type building in Strasbourg. I think that there is still a section of that building left, but I have not seen it in recent years so I cannot be sure; it may have been pulled down when the latest EP building was constructed there. That Assembly was so weak that it was a parade of occasional viewers, when people remembered to attend, collecting expenses, as in the House of Lords, not a salary, because in almost all cases they had a dual mandate. They then aired issues in a very vague way, with weak committees and with the Council of Ministers and the Commissioner sometimes not even bothering to attend or, perhaps, being a little bit late. The president of the Parliament might return after lunch somewhat after the agreed starting time. It had all those features of what was then considered to be, on a gradualist basis, a very weak parliamentary Assembly, consultative only.

We should look at what has happened since then in the development of the European Parliament. This process has taken a long time for those who may be impatient about the construction of the unified Europe of sovereign member states. I hasten to emphasise that just in case people get excited about the lurking perils of the dangerous word “federalism”, which is totally misinterpreted and explained improperly in Britain. Despite the passage of 35 years, a great deal of progress has been made as regards the new European Parliament. The links between the national parliaments and the European Parliament will, I think, accelerate even more. Some national parliaments in other countries have made a particular point of developing those links, while others have hung back.

Shortly after my corvée work in the 1970s—I found it immensely interesting, even at that level—the scrutiny procedure was established in the House of Commons after the controversial vote on entry and membership of the European Community, as it then was. The whole purpose of the scrutiny committee—it was the Foster committee to start with—was to keep the Europeans at bay and to make sure that they did not affect the national psyche, national sovereign legislation and the unitary governance in Parliament. That was the British model and Britain was determined that it would not be affected by joining a foreign-dominated Community. However, that move was long overdue. I am glad to say that the previous Conservative Government felt that way, too, particularly Harold Macmillan.

Progress has been made since then with the European Parliament becoming a sovereign Parliament in its own right with an increasingly distinguished membership. My noble friend Lord Wallace talked about the visit that he made there yesterday. I agree that it is an exciting place to visit nowadays. I never thought that I would use that word, because it sounds foolish, but the Parliament is exciting due to the whole range of very distinguished foreign visitors from all countries of the world. I saw Tzipi Livni several times on one of my recent visits before she left the Israeli Government. There are many other examples, such as the Americans, who have been mentioned in the debate. That process will develop even more now because of the Lisbon treaty processes. Therefore, the work of our EU Select Committee will become even more important as time goes on.

I pay tribute to the noble and learned Lord, Lord Mance, and to the noble Lord, Lord Sewel—this was mentioned at the beginning of the debate—for the massive amount of work that they did on a very complicated exercise. To go through procedures and processes is much more tedious than to deal with substantive policy. I also pay tribute to the noble Lord, Lord Roper. Shortly after the corvée in Strasbourg to which I referred, we had lunch in Paris—he may have forgotten this—well over 30 years ago. I have an uneasy and shameful confession to make in that I think that I have owed him a return lunch since that time. One day I hope to get the chance to do that. He was prevented from taking part at the beginning of the complicated investigation due to ill health, but every member of the committee would pay tribute to him for having caught up and for having become a genuine leader in terms of guiding the committee on how to deal with these complicated affairs. I thank him for that.

I also pay tribute to the officials. Our British officials inhabit a corridor in the European Parliament. It is not given to them but is made available, I suppose, on an appropriate basis. I also pay tribute to the other national officials who work alongside them, so that, as the scrutiny process proceeds under the new arrangements of the ordinary legislative procedure and codecision, they can act in concert, where necessary, when the national interests of member states—they may vary in theme and substance—have to be brought together. In the future, that may occur in emergency circumstances.

This process is all new and time is needed for it to develop. Genuine subsidiarity is not a contradiction for enthusiastic Europeans; it is very useful to ensure that reluctant members of the national voting community of each member state are brought on board by not thinking of their own national parliament as losing its value and substance. However, given our recent crisis, particularly in the House of Commons, and to a much lesser extent here, that may not be a primordial factor at the moment in Britain. I am sad that I have to say that. None the less, we want to make sure that in the future we are armed with the necessary subsidiarity, where that applies. The European Union now comprises many more members than the small number that it had—six to start with, which made its co-ordination and running so much easier—but it deals with democratically arrived-at, joint, European policies to strengthen the Union and to make it a stronger force externally as well as internally for the citizens of the European Union. We have been citizens since Maastricht.

Therefore, one needs to let these processes settle in and not rush them too much. The European Commission should not produce as much brand-new legislation. The length of time taken for it to be put through is another reason why one should try to accelerate the process to which the noble Lord, Lord Kerr, referred, and we should not have as many items of legislation in the future. The communication system that the Commission adopts before the draft legislation appears also helps us enormously by perhaps reducing the total and by giving us advance warning of the policy formation in the Council of Ministers, which is eventually presented to the committees of the European Parliament on an accelerated basis. That bodes well for the future if we can get things right.

I repeat the exhortation to the noble Lord, Lord Brett, whose body language has been encouraging when people have asked for the two remaining items to be agreed to. This would be a magisterial day if he were to acknowledge that the two areas, the limité and the guidance notes, could be dealt with. Then we could make even more progress in the United Kingdom. I believe that the public are more and more enthusiastic about us being a European country. I am thinking in particular of the younger generation, who regard Europe not as a peculiarity to be kept at bay but as a normative political organism and phenomenon.

To be fair to the Government, I conclude by saying that, in his letter, Chris Bryant, the refreshingly dynamic and highly polychromatic new Europe Minister—I say that as a compliment, not in any other way—put an energetic touch to these matters and responded pretty well to the committee. We should ensure that we respond to that. This is about working together. It is not a weakness for the EU Select Committee and the Government to be working together on these matters for the good of the public, the European Union and the European Parliament. In his letter of 14 January, the Minister stated carefully, on the committee’s third point regarding the consideration of requests to the Government for updates or supplementary memoranda, that,

“my intention was to provide a small amount of discretion for those rare occasions where either the Government has reasons for not being able to comply with the request, in which case the Government would need to justify fully … or where a more informal update or discussion with Committee clerks is desirable for reasons of time pressure. I agree entirely that departments should always provide additional information promptly when requested by a committee”.

It all depends on what is meant by “promptly”; if the noble Lord, Lord Brett, could enlighten us on that important adverb, I shall be deeply grateful. It all depends on the spirit of co-operation, working together, not being fearful of it, but actually building the Europe that we all want.

My Lords, I shall try to follow the advice, if not the precise practice, of the noble Lord, Lord Kerr of Kinlochard, and be as benign and analytical as this work justifies and requires. I very much admire the work of the noble Lord, Lord Roper, and his very distinguished committee in their ceaseless search to ensure that all incoming EU proposals for legislative change and amendments are properly and rigorously scrutinised by Parliament and that the loopholes and escape hatches—I am looking at the Minister and the government Bench—which allow either Her Majesty's Government or higher authorities and procedures to slip things through into our domestic law and onto our statute book, are narrowed to the absolute practical minimum.

In particular, I reinforce the concern of the noble Lord, Lord Roper, to ensure that proposals reach our Parliament in good time, whether they come from government departments or EU sources. The report says good things on that. This is a matter not just in relation to information reaching this Parliament, but reaching the Government themselves. Government and Parliament need to be much more aware at an earlier stage of what the EU authorities seem to be hatching.

A very good example of that is the recent financial regulations, which seem to have caught the Government, and indeed everyone else, by surprise. Incidentally, that is why a future Conservative Government will have a Treasury Minister spending a lot of time in Brussels. Clearly, some more communication is needed there.

The fact remains that the overall scrutiny of the flow of EU proposals—here, rather unusually, I agree with the noble Lord, Lord Dykes, that it is too big a flow with too many items—instruments, regulations and laws is still very far from satisfactory. There are too many overrides of scrutiny reserves—the noble Lord, Lord Willoughby de Broke, gave us the figure but others know it too; it is a fact—and too many excuses and arguments about exceptional situations, the need to hurry for this reason and that, the fact that Parliament was not sitting at the time, and so on. We have heard all these comments again and again, and they have been used often in the frequent overrides.

It may be thought that these are trivial issues. They are not. We are dealing here with the system that allowed both the European arrest warrant, which was very controversial, and the setting up of the European Defence Agency to be incorporated into British law via the override system. Frankly, we should say in this House—and perhaps our colleagues in the other place should say the same; they may even have done so—that more of this is just not acceptable. The override system may, in the last resort, be necessary and perhaps will have to be used, but in very limited circumstances.

Meanwhile, on top of that, as the excellent report makes clear, government departments are still left with a little too much wiggle room to decide what proposed changes to legislation have policy implications and should be referred to us in Parliament. As the noble Lord, Lord Roper, rightly said, he successfully got the word “significant” washed out of the system, and that was a very good move by him. Even so, it remains a matter of judgment, and I think that we should be tighter and more demanding on that. If there is a scintilla of a suggestion of a policy implication, the matter should be referred by the government department to our scrutiny mechanism for processing.

There is also a clear need for more explanatory memoranda behind the proposals—something that the committee of the noble Lord, Lord Roper, rightly calls for. The scrutiny guidance should of course be published; I find it incredible that it is not. As for these mysterious limité documents, which several of your Lordships referred to, why on earth ours have to be concealed when other Governments give them to their parliaments, I simply cannot imagine. When one tries to analyse what limité documents are or which ones are marked limité, it verges on comedy rather than serious administration. I think that we are looking to the Minister and hoping for that concession to come with a nice smile.

Finally, half the report is on the expanded codecision procedures and the informal so-called trialogue arrangements. There can be no doubt that the codecision procedures for fixing—I use the word advisedly—and amending EU legislation between the Parliament, the president and the Commission undermine democratic scrutiny and reduce the ability of national parliaments to have a say. I do not think that there is any disagreement about that, and they are not something that we would like to see stay in place. Frankly, I think they are unhealthy and need to be reformed, although I have to say—I hope not too cynically—that we will ask for a change in the trialogue process in vain. I believe that it will go on whatever we say.

This whole development also places a very heavy load on our own systems and procedures and on the work of the noble Lord, Lord Roper, and his family of committees. In fact, it is probably far too heavy a load, because the flow of legislation and proposals from Brussels is far too heavy. I think that there is growing agreement, even among the strongest enthusiasts for this whole procedure, that that is so. Then along comes the Lisbon treaty and, of course, the noble Lord, Lord Roper, and his committee have even more to do, notably the opportunity to give reasoned opinions on the subsidiary nature of proposed EU legislation and regulations as well as to report on all the numerous opt-ins that result from the treaty. With the collapsing of the pillars, this will fall into one pillar, and I understand that there are probably about 100 opt-ins to police and justice measures alone in the pipeline. It will be a very busy time for a lot of people. There is also the task of deciding to refer proposals to the European Court of Justice, which will also be a matter for the committee.

On whether the so-called yellow or orange card—the reasoned opinion system—involves our national Parliament in more EU legislation seems to my mind a little doubtful. I understand that to trigger second thoughts by the EU authorities, nine parliaments are required to object. In the end, the EU authorities can simply review the objections, if nine parliaments are involved, and then can carry on as before. In my language, that is not a sign of vastly increased parliamentary involvement. It is obvious that far too much legislative power and accountability have been allowed to slip away. It does not really fit with the modern world of decentralisation. It may have been right in the past but it certainly is not right today.

This is not the time or the debate in which to go into the plans of those on this side of the House for regaining some of the accountability and power. However, one clear and immediate result for us in this House is that it puts a disproportionately heavy load on House of Lords resources and staff. I would like to give notice to your Lordships that we on this side are not comfortable with the way in which the EU-related committee structure, inevitably and through no fault of its own, has to place such a heavy demand on the House of Lords’s resources. Very shortly, it may well be time for your Lordships to consider a new and differently balanced committee structure. I understand that your Lordships’ Constitution Committee is just about to produce a report, which I have not seen, but which I understand contains thoughts and ideas along the same lines.

When and if my party forms a Government, we remain determined to be very good Europeans, with strong and positive policies for our region of the world. The world does not end with Europe. We have our own bilateral interests and roles within the changing global network to consider and our links with rising powers of Asia—central, south eastern and Pacific Asia—and Latin America on which to focus, and on which this House is capable of bringing enormous expertise to bear. At the moment, there are difficulties in that respect.

In addition, given my party’s announced plan for a much more cross-departmental government structure for international and national security issues—getting away from the so-called “stove pipe” departmental boundaries mentality and divisions—and for a national security council with heavy international involvement, we might well need an international and security committee to track it with a wider remit than anything available through the narrower EU prism. I suggest to your Lordships that the parliamentary committee structure—

My Lords, I am trying to follow in some detail what the noble Lord is saying. Clearly, it could be of great significance, given certain events and outcomes. Would the noble Lord clarify whether it is his intention to maintain a committee structure which would have the same function as the present European Union Committee and its sub-committees? If not, could he be more explicit about the type of changes he envisages?

We are talking about a balance, and I am talking about matters which are for your Lordships' House. I am just indicating the views of some colleagues in my party that we may put forward to your Lordships—to the House—to decide whether a different balance is required. We are where we are. Certainly it must include mechanisms to cope with the considerably expanded load with which the noble Lord, Lord Roper, and the committee, of which the noble Lord, Lord Sewel, is a distinguished member, has been grappling with. We must be careful not, as a result, to exclude by virtue of resources the ability to consider the other vast developments in the world and the shifting global power which places Europe in a different perspective and places our interests in a different perspective.

The usual argument that developing a change of balance and a new committee structure would duplicate the Commons is not valid, because the range of issues—covering our relations, concerns and interests in Asia, Africa, the Middle East and Latin America—will be far wider than anything which either the Commons Foreign Affairs Committee, which I know a bit about, or any new committee in the Commons could possibly cover.

I concede that those are big issues, to which much new thought will need to be given. Meanwhile, I repeat what I said at the beginning: I salute the efforts of the noble Lord, Lord Roper, and his committee in seeking to strengthen the existing system. That is certainly needed; the report addresses the immediate problems with thoroughness; and I welcome it.

My Lords, no Minister would ever deliberately seek to mislead the House, but sometimes the truth can be spoken with greater enthusiasm. When I say that I enjoyed the report, I enjoyed the Government's response and I enjoyed this debate as an individual and as a representative of the Government, it is the truth. It has been an uplifting and positive debate, containing some important points—not least some of the points made by the noble Lord from the Official Opposition Front Bench, although many of them seemed to be issues for the House or the committee rather than for the Government, so I am sure that he will forgive me if I do not refer to them in my response.

We have reflected here today that the Lisbon treaty, now in force, renames “codecision” as the “ordinary legislative procedure”. This reflects the fact that this procedure is now the default method for agreeing legislative acts at EU level, giving the directly elected representatives of the European Parliament increased power in such areas as agriculture, which has been mentioned by noble Lords, and justice and home affairs.

The Government welcome that. The terminology may be new, but the established process remains broadly the same. It would be disingenuous to pretend that on occasion the involvement of the European Parliament does not make it harder to achieve our aims in negotiations. But, on the whole, our experience has shown that, as well as improving the democratic accountability of the European Union, the fuller involvement of the European Parliament in the decision-making process results in more balanced—a word that has been used several times in this debate—and focused legislation.

An example is that the European Parliament—along with the UK—champions the principles of the single market, and has consistently resisted attempts by some member states to take a more protectionist tack, helping to protect UK competitiveness. More recently, MEPs helped to ensure an ambitious outcome on the 2020 climate change package, and pushed forward key ideas such as pilot projects on carbon capture and storage.

As the noble Lord, Lord Roper, emphasised in his introduction, the Government note that there has been an increase in the agreement reached at First Reading or early during Second Reading, and that the use of trialogues, mentioned by several noble Lords, can inhibit the scrutiny process by national parliaments. I was particularly struck and influenced by the contribution from the noble Lord, Lord Brittan, who got it right in his use of the word “balance”—there is a balance between an efficient process taking forward issues that can be negotiated, but not in such a way that denies scrutiny to national parliaments, or the European Parliament.

The Government are therefore pleased to be able to agree, as reflected in the opening speech by the noble Lord, Lord Roper, to many of the recommendations relating to the ordinary legislative procedure and parliamentary scrutiny; namely, the Government will update the committee every time a change with policy implications is agreed or proposed. This point was made by the noble Lord, Lord Howell, and other noble Lords. The Government will provide the committee with all presidency compromise texts, and they will update the committee in advance of decisions taken by the Council, including at COREPER, to agree European parliamentary amendments. We believe that an enabling factor in the increase in early agreements is the vast improvement in the European Commission’s consultation process and the need for proposals to be properly and fully justified through full impact assessments. It stands to reason that Commission proposals that better reflect the thoughts of the European Parliament and stakeholders, national parliaments included, should be agreed more quickly. Indeed, the committee looked at this very question as part of its inquiry into the initiation of EU legislation and heard directly from practitioners about the benefits.

Another likely consequence of the extension of the ordinary legislative process is that it will, at least at first, slow down the legislative process—I heard in several contributions in the past 30 minutes or so that that will be seen to be not a bad thing—and afford national parliaments sufficient time to conduct effective scrutiny of legislative acts, which is something that noble Lords will welcome.

The Lisbon treaty also gives national parliaments, for the first time, a direct say in making EU laws. The Government hope that this House, and the other place, will make use of the new provisions on legislative treatment in Lisbon in this regard and that noble Lords will continue to offer the European Commission the benefit of their considerable expertise and experience through the Commission’s consultation process. I thought that point was put rather well by the noble Lord, Lord Bowness, and was echoed, in greater detail, by the noble Lord, Lord Dykes, who said that the Lisbon treaty underlines that the EU has only those competences expressly conferred on it by member states through the treaties. Taken together with the increased powers for national parliaments, this further embeds the principle of the sovereignty of member states. A key element of this is the ability of a free and robust Parliament to examine government policy.

When we speak of parliamentary scrutiny processes, it is clear that we have one of the most sophisticated scrutiny systems in all EU member states. None the less, there is no room for complacency, and I commend the EU Select Committee for seeking to enhance the system through the report and its recommendations. Much of the ongoing debate about the committee—some of the contributions are not for the Government—was clearly seized of that requirement. The noble Lord, Lord Wallace of Saltaire, testified to that expertise in the comments that he reported were made in Europe yesterday about the value of your Lordships’ EU Committee’s reports.

I hope that the commitments I have outlined will allow the committee access to the information it requires to keep abreast of the progress of negotiations on individual legislative proposals and will allow it an opportunity to feed its views to the Government.

A number of noble Lords issued a challenge for me to smile, which is easily done, and to meet desires on two points that the noble Lord, Lord Roper, raised in his introduction, which is not as easy as smiling. They were about limité and guidance. We should note that the noble Lord, Lord Roper, and my colleague the Minister for Europe have engaged in further discussions, as the noble Lord made clear in his opening remarks. There are practical issues involved in making limité documents—documents with a restricted distribution that cannot be made publicly available—available to the committee, but we are confident that we can devise handling caveats to address the restrictions and accept the desirability of proactively providing the committee with appropriate limité documents at critical points in negotiations. Subject to ministerial approval across government, we hope to be able to begin providing the committee with access to certain limité documents from the end of next month.

I carefully noted the words “appropriate” and “certain”. Can the Minister give any guidance on the criteria that will determine which limité documents are appropriate and which are the certain limité documents that he is prepared to disclose?

One always says what a very good question it is when, if it does not bowl the batsman at middle stump, it at least provides some difficulty. The answer is that I cannot give any detail. As several noble Lords have said, this is a growing and learning process. The Government are intent that the right information is provided at the right time, as the committee says. That, I am sure, will guide us in taking this forward. If not, I am sure the committee will be very quick to advise the Government.

I suggest that this is fairly simple, and that the Minister might, with the Minister for Europe, come to the simple conclusion that if the overriding rule is that the EU Select Committee and its sub-committees are informed of any document or any development that has policy implications, presumably that will apply to limité documents, too. Let us, for heaven’s sake, not introduce by the back door the weasel words “significant”, “substantive” or “appropriate”, having just chucked them out of the front door.

My Lords, the noble Lord gives good advice. I will take the issue back to my colleagues in government and advise them of your Lordships’ view.

This leads me to the second point on which my smile and good will were being sought: the question of guidance. I can provide something very similar here.

My honourable colleague the Minister for Europe will write to the noble Lord, Lord Roper, shortly on the question of limité documents. In the mean time, I shall ensure that he has sight of the debate in your Lordships’ House to guide his response.

The second area of discussion between the Government and the committee that is still under way is on the scrutiny guidance that we can use within government to set up departments’ responsibility in this respect. The guidance is being updated to reflect the new commitments that we have made on the scrutiny of the ordinary legislative procedure. As has been said, it will also need to reflect our approach to limité documents. The committee has pressed us to make the whole of this document publicly available and subject to some drafting changes, which I hope are not the weasel words that concerned the noble Lord, Lord Hannay. We have no problem making this document publicly available on the Cabinet Office website, and again we hope to be able to implement that within the next month.

I do not want to sound like Oliver Twist, but there was a third request: for improved access to Council documents on the progress of a codecision negotiation, as, say, the French Assemblée has.

I thank the noble Lord for that contribution. Once again, I shall ensure that it is fed into the feedback that I give to my colleagues so that they can respond further to the noble Lord, Lord Roper, on that point when the Minister for Europe writes to him.

As I said, we hope to have the documentation on the website within the next month, and I hope that my assurances, while not necessarily meeting every point that concerns noble Lords, will underline our commitment to taking forward the committee’s recommendations.

The most substantive point tonight related to scrutiny override and was made by two noble Lords, one of whom was the noble Lord, Lord Willoughby de Broke. I enjoyed his contribution, but then I do like party political broadcasts, being something of a political nerd. On the more substantive issue, which I think was made by the noble Lord, Lord Howell of Guildford, in the first half of 2009, only one override was used, which is the level to which we aspire. Following the 2009 Summer Recess, this figure increased. However, the UK utilises its parliamentary reserve in Brussels so that we can hear the views of the committee before documents are signed off. When we override, we do so for operational reasons where UK interests are at stake and there is a risk of setting back key EU actions, such as civilian missions being able to carry out important work.

Where there are administrative errors, the FCO is quick to correct them and explain any shortcomings to the committee. In 2008, the Foreign Office provided 135 Explanatory Memoranda for scrutiny, all on fast moving issues. Of these, 20 were overrides, including four on the crisis in Georgia and three on the piracy mission off the coast of Somalia. I hope that that in part meets the points made by the noble Lords, Lord Willoughby de Broke and Lord Howell.

Parliamentary scrutiny is essential in informing and improving our approach to EU policy-making. Debates such as this are a vital part of that scrutiny. I therefore re-emphasise the Government’s commitment to getting the scrutiny process right. As the noble Lord, Lord Sewel, said, we need to work at it. In that sense, we are entering and going through a collaborative procedure. I entirely accept the points made from the Liberal Benches that we need to work closely with our international partners. I should like therefore to give the commitment to continue to review that process in the light of developments at the European level. I thank noble Lords once again for their commitment to the parliamentary scrutiny of EU affairs, which I believe is one of the strengths of our House and beneficial to us all. I should particularly like to commend the noble Lord, Lord Roper, and his committee for their timely and constructive reports. I hope therefore that my report of progress shortly to be made on the issues outstanding from the committee’s excellent report will be helpful.

I need to make a correction: the overrides to which I referred were reported from the FCO alone and may not cover other departments.

My Lords, I am grateful to all noble Lords who have taken part in this extremely valuable, full and useful debate. As the noble Lord, Lord Willoughby de Broke, said, when we prepared this report we thought that it was rather technical and did not imagine that it would receive quite as full a debate as we have had today. I am particularly pleased that a number of people who served in Brussels in various capacities have been able to speak. I hope that the Foreign Office will read this debate in Hansard, because it contains the important views of the House.

I am grateful for the general tone of the Minister’s speech. He was somewhat limited on one subject. We are not quite clear where we are on limité documents and I found the use of the word “appropriate” rather strange. It is my understanding that when the noble Lord, Lord Hurd, was Foreign Secretary, he gave an instruction that the word “appropriate” should never be used in the Foreign Office because it was one of the ultimate weasel words. That edict has obviously disappeared but it is something which I try to remember. I hope that we will have a clear statement as to which limité documents we have when I receive the letter from the honourable friend of the Minister, the Minister for Europe.

The response on the Cabinet Office scrutiny guidance was more encouraging. We look forward to seeing the revised form on the web. I know that on both those points, the noble and learned, Lord Mance, who was particularly concerned about both matters when we were carrying this report through, will be pleased to hear the decisions which were made known.

My Lords, in my response I omitted to make a point on noble Lords’ concerns about departmental responses on scrutiny being variable. The guidance to which the noble Lord is referring, which we will publish, will be made available to all departments. They will be reminded of the need to be consistent. Noble Lords made a number of valid points. I will ensure that the Hansard report of this debate goes to all departments.

I am grateful to the Minister. Perhaps I may elucidate on the point made by the noble Lord, Lord Kerr of Kinlochard, on the question of access by our national parliamentary representative in Brussels to Council documents on the same basis as applies to the French and some of the other parliamentary representatives. I understand that discussions on that subject are beginning to take place in Brussels. Again I hope that there will be some progress on that fairly soon.

I should like to make three further points. First, in the original presentation I said that in the trialogue the rapporteur was the main speaker. However, the rapporteur is not necessarily the only representative of the European Parliament present. The chair of the committee will be present, as will, interestingly, what are called shadow rapporteurs. Each political group appoints a rapporteur for a particular topic so there is a rather full representation from the Parliament, although the negotiations in the trialogue are led by the rapporteur. I did not make that sufficiently clear.

As to my second point, I was interested in what the noble Lord, Lord Howell, said about the future of committees. I realise that there are always demands for more committees. All I would say, without wanting to be too supportive of the European Union committees, is that this structure of committees appears to be serving the House well and I hope that we will look very carefully before we change it for something else. No doubt we will have to return to this issue on another occasion.

On the issue of scrutiny overrides—a matter which concerns us—I was interested in what the noble Lord said. In fact, in this House the total number of scrutiny overrides for all departments for the first half of last year was 14. We were pleased that that was down from 21 in the second half of 2008. Unfortunately the figure went up in the second half of 2009 and we are trying to pursue this issue with departments. We have tabled Questions for Written Answer to get the total numbers on the record and one was answered in last Monday’s Hansard. We have tabled Questions for Written Answer to name and shame departments responsible for overrides which could have been avoided. One involving the Foreign Office was answered on 8 December. Last year Sub-Committee B summoned the Permanent Secretary of Defra to give evidence about her department’s failure to meet its scrutiny obligations.

Last week, in a positive way, we had a meeting for the scrutiny co-ordinators, the officials, in all departments. They met the staff of the European Union committees, who encouraged them to improve their performance. That shows the way in which we are attempting to address the issue of overrides and ensure that they are reduced.

If it was not for the lateness of the hour I would have liked to have responded to what the noble Lord, Lord Willoughby de Broke, said about the toothless tabby. We can provide him with information on the way in which we have had impact. I cited earlier the way in which our report on the timeshare directive in 2008 was well received by the European Parliament. In her evidence to the committee, Arlene McCarthy said that she had drawn from it to move quite a number of the amendments which were in the final text of that document. We have a number of other equal examples.

There is one other matter to which I should like to refer. There is a concern, which the European Parliament shares, about the risk of lack of transparency. That is why in its new standing orders it issued a code of conduct for negotiating in the context of the ordinary legislative procedure. In this, it makes clear that there has to be a period of time between the agreement in the negotiations and the decision in the committee in order to,

“allow political groups to prepare their final position”.

This is so that the political groups, if they do not like the deal that has been done in the negotiations, will vote against it when it comes up for consideration at First Reading. That has happened on occasion. I should correct the suggestion of the noble Lord, Lord Willoughby de Broke, that nothing could be done once agreement had been reached in the trialogue—it can; a decision still has to be made by the European Parliament, and there have been cases where the Parliament as a whole has rejected the agreements which were reached in the trialogues. This has been a useful debate.