Government: Legislative Programme

My Lords, perhaps I may be the first to thank the noble Baroness for repeating the Statement. In effect, this is a Prime Minister's speech. It mentions 16 Bills which would normally have been mentioned in the gracious Speech. It makes me wonder whether the Prime Minister has graciously left Her Majesty a couple of tiddlers to announce when she comes here in November. Many of us will also find that this smacks of the further Americanisation of politics—a presidential approach that runs counter to the spin about reducing spin and which is geared more to presentation than to effective constitutional government. It enables the Government to do what they tried to do 10 years ago and were rebuffed for—putting tawdry new Labour slogans, on which the Statement is notably rich, into the announcement of the legislative programme. I hope that we will think again about the idea of a Prime Minister's speech. Little of this is new. Much of it, such as the Climate Change Bill, welcome though that is, and the Planning Bill, was a re-announcement of a re-announcement. Other aspects, such as the absurdly named Enforcement and Sanctions Bill, which we are told is all about less enforcement and fewer sanctions and regulations, are pre-announcements of what will in due time become re-announcements. Pre-announcements, re-announcements, spin—how very familiar all this is. The Prime Minister claims to be setting out to solve problems in domestic policy. It is odd how he skates over the fact that he has been running domestic policy in this country for the past 10 years, as the Alastair Campbell diaries again confirm. It is a programme allegedly to solve problems that he himself has largely created. We are told that there will be a roadshow to discuss the Prime Minister’s speech. I hope that the noble Baroness will be able to tell us how that will operate. We are told that people will have their say. That is to be encouraged, but they are not of course allowed to have their say on what really matters, such as a referendum on the European constitution. Why not? Will there be a website on which people may comment on the Prime Minister’s speech? If so, what guarantee is there that any more notice will be taken of it than of the near 2 million people who wrote in to oppose road pricing? In fact, is there a proposal for a road pricing Bill to be in the parliamentary programme? The idea of raising the school leaving age to 18 is not new. It will certainly provoke debate, not least among many young people. There is certainly a need to improve standards for children in care, but two more Bills on childcare are no substitute for the kind of measures proposed by my right honourable friend Iain Duncan Smith in his bold and far-reaching report. Where in this programme is the desperately needed action to bind families and rebuild our broken society? We hear that there is to be yet another health service Bill. Will the noble Baroness tell the House how many NHS Bills there have been since 1997, and how many reorganisations? I count eight Bills and 10 reorganisations, but I may have missed out one or two. Does not embarking on a Bill make a mockery of the so-called NHS review that was announced only last week? How can the Government listen to this review if they have made up their mind already? It is ludicrous and makes one fear that this whole operation is really a giant gimmick. Of course, we welcome the offer of discussions on security. This is a change, and I congratulate the Prime Minister on it. We also welcome the noble and gallant Lord, Lord West of Spithead, who will take legislation through this House and whom I promise very detailed and constructive scrutiny in Committee. However, may I say how disappointing we on these Benches—and, I suspect, the Liberal Democrats—find the new Prime Minister’s parroting of his predecessor’s obsession with the costly folly of identity cards? Again, there is talk of a Constitutional Reform Bill. As there have been no proposals since the conflicting votes in both Houses earlier this year, will the noble Baroness confirm that this will not include legislation to alter your Lordships’ House? The Regulatory Enforcement and Sanctions Bill might be an ideal vehicle for the noble Lord, Lord Jones of Birmingham, whom we also welcome, for putting his deregulatory stamp on legislation and reducing the burdens on employers that have piled up in recent years. The whole House looks forward to his piloting of the Employment Simplification Bill, given the CBI’s trenchant observations in the past on the national minimum wage. Will the noble Baroness confirm that Professor Sir Ara Darzi will lead on the health and social care Bill? The noble Lord, Lord Hunt of Kings Heath, was a truly outstanding manager of legislation, and of much else besides, and we will miss him; but Sir Ara’s fame goes before him, and we must assume that the Prime Minister hand-picked him for this role. It may surprise the noble Baroness to know that we on this side of the House see no need for a debate on this mishmash. If the Government are offering time, let us have debates on specific aspects of policy, such as family breakdown or further change in the health service. Certainly, in due course, we should have a debate on housing, on which the Statement majored. That is a crucial question in which are wrapped many complex questions that go beyond housing into planning, the environment, immigration and family life. That would be far more useful than bringing into this place the kind of general political debate that the other place relishes. After all, we will have due time to discuss these and other proposals in the debate and actual programme of the actual gracious Speech. I conclude by saying that sadly obscured behind this gimmick is the germ of a good idea; that Parliament should have more time, both before and after legislation, to scrutinise. There are proven mechanisms for that: the Green Paper, the White Paper, the draft Bill, and the kind of pre-legislative scrutiny that is proving to be so valuable on the deeply controversial Human Tissue and Embryos Bill. Those things can take place at any time of the year. We do not have to wait for a Prime Minister’s speech, any more than we have to wait for the gracious Speech. Wrapping it all up in a cocktail risks losing the clarity, distinction and focus that are Parliament’s duty and, if I may say so, this House’s strength. Sadly, there is nothing in all of this about one glaring lack in our system; that is, post-legislative scrutiny. Would not a bit of time given to post-legislative scrutiny avoid many of the administrative follies and failures that burden our citizens and inform better legislation in the future—for instance, the Licensing Act and the Gambling Act? All I see here is a pig in a poke. While I would welcome any measure that would genuinely improve parliamentary scrutiny, I regret that there is nothing in this pre-planned presentational gimmick that will do anything for that.