Constitutional Reform and Governance Bill

I could not agree more on the proliferation of quangos, and also on the control that they exert and the lack of transparency within them. The point was made earlier that there are now so many quangos that they have to share the same acronyms. We need to look at where power lies. We need to ensure that the public not only have confidence in where power lies, but have trust in those who hold that power. With the current system of quangos, which is prevalent in many areas and particularly in education, not only is it impossible to hold the Government to account, but where quangos are seen to be at fault the Government can say that they are arm's-length bodies and absolve themselves of all responsibility. We heard from my hon. and learned Friend the Member for Beaconsfield (Mr. Grieve) about the 12 areas of power that the Government were looking to shift. He could name only two—bishops and quangos—that had been affected and suggested that in fact the figure was perhaps only one and a half or one and a quarter, the half or quarter being the quangos. I would go further and say that the figure is just one, because the Bill does not deal with the power that quangos still hold or with our being able to hold them to account. My experience on the Children, Schools and Families Committee is an illustration of exactly how the Executive are still trying to hold close to their chest the power that we know should be much more readily accessible to us as both members of the public and Members of this House. There is more that we can do with Select Committees. We could have elected Chairmen. As my hon. Friend the Member for Harwich said, we could also open up Departments' finances to Select Committee scrutiny. That would send a clear message that the power of the Executive needs to be far more measured against the power of the legislature. Let me move on to some aspects of the Bill that, in the main, I welcome. I start with part 6, which deals with courts and tribunals. We have heard from other Members, particularly the right hon. Member for Leicester, East (Keith Vaz), about the judicial appointments system. It is clear that the process of judicial appointments has been subject to substantial change in recent years, as the Lord Chancellor acknowledged when he mentioned that judicial appointments would be best left as they stood because the system had been changed only a couple of years ago. However, there is a deeper issue than that in judicial appointments: how the current system is working. Only recently, we have seen substantial changes, with the Constitutional Reform Act 2005, which introduced a new Supreme Court and established the Judicial Appointments Commission. We then had the Tribunals, Courts and Enforcement Act 2007, which made changes to the eligibility criteria. Now we see another, more symbolic change, in clause 35, with the Prime Minister being removed from the process of appointment to the judiciary in England and Wales. However, there is still a fundamental problem at the heart of judicial appointments: the backlog that has developed in the appointment of judges and recorders in particular. We know that there is a shortage of judges in our courts, particularly in the family division. I declare an interest as a non-practising barrister at the family bar. It is clear that we are short of good, well-qualified family judges, but we are also just short of family judges. The slowness of the process has dragged things out to the point where a lot of extremely high-calibre candidates are waiting to go through the selection process to be appointed to the bench. If things are not brought forward, they may feel frustrated and we would miss out on their great service.