Government: Draft Legislative Programme

My Lords, I am tempted to ask the noble Lord, Lord Howarth of Newport, for an exact definition of a ““portable antiquity””. I wonder whether Members of your Lordships’ House qualify. My colleagues and I warmly welcome not only the Statement and the way in which the Minister introduced it this afternoon, but the fact that we are having this debate today, which I think will become an annual event. I hope that that will be taken as read, given that no fewer than six of my noble friends have contributed to this debate, all welcoming the process. However, I sound a note of caution. There is a sort of precedent for this approach. It occurred in the other place in 2002, when the then Modernisation Select Committee, under the leadership of the then Leader of the House, the late and very much lamented Robin Cook, introduced proposals which he hoped would take away what had become a tendency to what he described as parliamentary mud-wrestling. Our recommendation at that time—I served on the committee—was as follows: "““We recommend that there should be collective consultations with other parties in the House on the broad shape of the legislative year, those Bills intended to be published in draft, those Bills intended to be carried over and which Bills are expected to be introduced in the Commons””." Obviously that had no implications for this House—quite rightly, that place did not presume to make a contribution on what should happen here. Not only did all parties in the House agree to that, but there was a brief experiment to have just those consultations under Mr Cook. He convened a meeting, which I attended on behalf of my party as the shadow Leader and was attended by Eric Forth on behalf of the Conservatives. It is no secret that the ““business managers””—the Chief Whip—were furious. It is also no secret that, on the whole, the Conservatives were ambivalent, because they did not want to be that constructive. That is not the atmosphere down at that end of the corridor; I am delighted to say that it is much more the atmosphere here. There were no further meetings. The experiment sadly died when Mr Cook resigned over the Iraq invasion the following March. I mention that because I believe that the Prime Minister's Statement and the accompanying draft programme are a belated and very welcome attempt to build on that previous consensus; but we will have to work with it and work on it. We cannot just have a one-off and stop. If this is going to improve parliamentary scrutiny, we will need a number of assurances from the Minister today. First, the process must be ongoing in both Houses—it does not just stop now—and has to involve all parties and the Cross Benches in this House. Secondly, it really must mean that we have less ill thought-out, excessively cumbersome legislation which gives us so overloaded a programme that we get legislative indigestion. Next, the Government Whips, particularly in the other place, should not seek unnecessary control over the detailed consideration of legislation. The use of programming and guillotining at the other end of the building is excessive, and we have to seek a way in which better agreement between the parties produces a better result so that the Bill committees can prioritise their own examination of Bills rather than have it imposed on them. Next, the Cook reforms—this has already been referred to, notably by the noble Lord, Lord Norton of Louth—wanted to introduce a great deal more pre-legislative scrutiny to improve the quality of consideration in both Houses. I believe that we should not accept carry-over in either House unless there has been pre-legislative scrutiny. That was the basis of that agreement and was the trade-off: that there would be better consideration and therefore that it would be acceptable to the opposition parties. Finally and most importantly, I truly believe that your Lordships' House should be given full opportunity and full responsibility, as the revising Chamber, to manage its own careful scrutiny of draft legislation, the Bills sent to us first at the beginning of the Session and in the subsequent dialogue between the two Houses. I hope that the noble Lord will again reassure us that the unanimously agreed resistance to government attempts to clip the wings of your Lordships' House—resistance which was absolutely conclusive in the Cunningham report, Conventions of the UK Parliament—will be underlined and not undermined by what happens next. Quite rightly, the document contains a very considerable section on housing. Noble Lords who have spoken on this, led by the right reverend Prelate the Bishop of Chelmsford, have rightly given great emphasis to this section. Throughout the House we recognise its importance. I have had a connection with Shelter, the national campaign for the homeless, for nearly 40 years. It is a shame on successive Governments that the work of Shelter, after all this time, is as vital, viable and vigorous as ever. I do not want to get into great detail on the points that have already been made but I want to make two very straightforward additions to the discussions that have already taken place today. I accept that much of the work that will have to be done is outwith the legislative programme—it will be financial, regulatory and organisational improvement—but I think that the total failure to grasp the nettle of second homes must be included in our discussions on the legislation. Some vulnerable communities, not least in my own area of Cornwall, are now devastated by excessive second homes. It not only removes any chance of working people finding an affordable home but causes ghost villages in winter, closing schools and other facilities and causing huge diseconomies for everyone else. We must have legislation to make the loss of premises into the second home category a matter for planning consent to change of use. Although I endorse everything said about the Planning-gain Supplement Bill, it seems rather timid. The vast increase in house prices has very little to do with general inflation; indeed, figures out today show that, in the 10 years of the Blair Government, the general price rise has been about 50 per cent, but house prices meanwhile have increased by about 300 per cent in many parts of the country. The driver is not the additional cost of building materials but the additional cost of land. Unless we address this crucial fact we will not make any great improvements. Agricultural production is in the doldrums—farmland prices have hardly moved over that period—but when development hope values are taken into account, the result is simply explosive. Inflation is taking a large number of properties out of the reach of many of our fellow citizens either for rent or for purchase. We need a Government who have the guts to tax the increase in the value afforded by all development, not just housing development, so the community directly benefits from the additional value it has given to the developer by giving planning consent. I turn to the section of the paper on wider constitutional reform, specifically the Constitutional Reform Bill. It is very welcome, as noble Lords have said today, that we are having this careful analysis of what must surely be one of the most important issues facing this Parliament. Reforming the legislative process, to which reference is made here, may seem quite esoteric—something for the anoraks of the Westminster village—but unless we strengthen the whole parliamentary scrutiny process right through this Bill, we will never improve the parliamentary product. Product and process hang together. As we have already suggested on these Benches, these changes are of such wide significance throughout Parliament that they must surely be contained in a draft Bill for pre-legislative scrutiny by a Joint Committee. That is the only way that we will have a totally integrated approach to these issues. If the Government think that they can simply divide and rule between the two Houses or between the different parties on this issue, I should warn them that that would be very damaging to the conclusion, the process and the product. I really do believe that the Government must avoid the legislative indigestion to which I referred earlier. The sheer number and scope of the Bills mentioned here is not in itself encouraging, and I know that there will be others. Last night, my honourable friend in the other place, Simon Hughes, who speaks on these matters, said: "““Legislation, legislation, legislation is no substitute for good administration””.—[Official Report, Commons, 25/7/07; col. 978.]" I think that Members throughout your Lordships' House would agree with that. In the end—I am not very good at these little sayings; I may have it wrong, but if I do then I am inventing a new one—warm words butter no parsnips. If this paper proves to be a one-off, and if in particular the Government's business managers in both Houses, and of all parties too, fail to adapt to the new mindset of a co-operative, constructive business planning process, then this paper will not be worth the 75 per cent recycled paper that it is written on. I wish all Members of your Lordships’ House a refreshing, relaxing, recreative recess so that we can return with new energy for a reforming Session in the autumn.