Constitutional Reform and Governance Bill

I am grateful for the opportunity to speak on the Second Reading of this Bill. I assure my hon. Friend the Member for Harwich (Mr. Carswell) that I am genuinely here to speak on the Bill and under no other pretence. I wish to touch on two parts of the Bill in particular—part 1 in respect of the civil service and part 6 on courts and tribunals. First and foremost, however, I want to develop some of the arguments made already this evening about the omissions from the Bill, many of which are extremely significant. It is fair to say that the Bill has received rather muted applause. It has been described as lacking in real zeal, as a mouse of a Bill, as trimmings rather than meat and by the hon. Member for Cambridge (David Howarth) as a pathetic little Bill. I shall be more charitable and call it a modest Bill, although the original constitutional reform plans have clearly been watered down since last year. The question is more what is not in the Bill than what is in it. Clearly the seeds of the Bill lay in the idea that there was a deep fracture at the heart of our democracy and that restoring public trust in the political system was a priority. For me, the heart of that is ensuring the independence of this House, and the genuine purpose of its power is to hold the Government to account. On 27 May, the Prime Minister said that one of his main priorities was the""strengthening of Parliament against the executive"." I am still a relatively new Member of this House, but I have been exposed to the system of Select Committees, in which one of the first innovations in trying to provide greater scrutiny of the Executive through public appointments has been tried out. Sadly, I can feel only dismayed by the process that has been played out in the Children, Schools and Families Committee this week and last. I was led to believe that we, as Committee members, had a responsibility as well as a mandate to ensure that those public appointments, through the pre-appointment hearings, were genuinely in the interests of the public and that our word would be taken not for granted but with great seriousness and care by the Executive making the appointment. Despite the noises from the Government about wanting to open up the scrutiny of the Executive, we are left essentially with a charade in which Committee members—I include myself in this—feel no more than spectators of an Executive sport. It raises the question whether what the Government want to achieve is what we want to achieve. There is no point in holding pre-appointment hearings unless they have meaning. How can a unanimous decision by a Select Committee not to endorse a candidate for a prominent and important public post—the Children's Commissioner—not even be given a second thought by the Secretary of State when deciding on the correct person for the appointment, and simply be brushed to one side without any consultation? That is a huge disappointment, which reflects in many ways my concerns about omissions from the Bill. Where in the Bill will the patronage of the Prime Minister be cut? Where does the Bill address the Prime Minister's power to destroy or create Departments by subjecting it to parliamentary approval? Where in the Bill is the power for the introduction of annual debates in the House of Commons on all Departments' plans and objectives? We have heard from both sides of the House the desire to introduce greater scrutiny of the Government, particularly through the legislature, but we see in the Bill very little attempt to bring that about.