Constitutional Reform and Governance Bill

It is a pleasure to speak at the perhaps somewhat premature end of this debate, which has been reassuring to some extent but also slightly depressing. It has been reassuring because debates on Bills of this sort bring out the best in the House, in many ways, and the tone has been reflective, thoughtful and serious in addressing very important issues; but depressing because it has been poorly attended, especially by Labour Members, and because so much of it has been about what is not in the Bill, not what is in it. That reflects what my hon. and learned Friend the Member for Beaconsfield (Mr. Grieve) said at the outset when he rightly dilated on the grandiloquent claims made by the Prime Minister at the inception of his premiership about how he was going to bring about a great constitutional renewal: he talked about a new settlement using very fine, splendid and high-sounding phrases. We have been through several iterations of draft Bills, White Papers and Green Papers along the way. As my hon. and learned Friend said, the mountain laboured and brought forth a mouse—not a ridiculous mouse, as the phrase generally has it, but a rag-bag in terms of constitutional reform. To adapt the phrase, it is a modest little Bill with much to be modest about. We warmly welcome the civil service parts of the Bill, which are my principal concern. This legislation has been talked about for a very long time; I think that the commitment was made by John Major's Government in the late 1990s. It has been a long time in gestation, and here it is, given birth to at long last. We hope that it can come into effect shortly. It is interesting how much of the debate was not about what is in the Bill, but what is not in it. The hon. Member for Cannock Chase (Dr. Wright), in a typically intelligent, temperate and thoughtful speech—he was very unpartisan in his approach, as we have come to expect—talked persuasively about the need to adopt a holistic approach as regards constitutional reform. He referred to the dangers of making piecemeal changes without giving sufficient thought to the ramifications of change and the interaction of different parts of our mysterious constitution, and the need to be looking at these changes in the round. We would all agree with that. We look forward with keen anticipation to the ex cathedra pronouncements from the Public Administration Committee, which he chairs, on the role of the House of Commons and its relationship with the Government. The hon. Member for Cambridge (David Howarth) was another who talked about what the Bill lacks. As one would expect, he spoke about the need for electoral reform; we did not agree with him, but he made his case and we listened respectfully. He also talked about the hole in the Bill that might have been filled by provisions on party funding. The need for such provisions persists as strongly today as it did when the Hayden Phillips discussions were embarked upon three and a half years ago, when Tony Blair committed the Labour party to being willing to make the profound changes needed to tackle the abuse of union funding, which has made it difficult to make serious progress on party funding reform in the mean time. I am sorry that I missed nearly all the speech of my hon. Friend the Member for Harwich (Mr. Carswell), but I suspect that he talked about the case he has eloquently been making for recall provisions for Members of Parliament. They may not always be comfortable with such provisions, but he is right to make the case for them. There has been a certain amount of discussion about the provisions on House of Lords reform. The Lord Chancellor's defence of the proposals was interesting. I do not believe that anyone would claim that the current arrangements are in any way what we would want to start with. No one would design the system to look as it currently does. It is a vestige, a residue, of the unfinished reform of the second Chamber embarked upon by the Government 11 or 12 years ago. The point is that the system was deliberately left as an untidy remnant, as an earnest of the intention to pursue full reform. It was meant to be an irritant, and it was deliberately and explicitly left in place as such by the then Lord Chancellor, Lord Irvine, to hold the Government's feet to the fire and ultimately make them deliver reform of the House of Lords. Parliament is entitled to treat it as a breach of good faith for the Government now to come along, without any justification or any serious case for the steps taken in the Bill being necessary, and remove the impetus on a Government to persist in pursuing long-term reform. The House is entitled to resent that. I wish to say a little about part 1 of the Bill, which deals with the civil service and is effectively the first half of the Bill. We welcome it, and it is long overdue. The system that has existed for so long—a civil service that is independent and impartial, and to which an incoming Government cannot make wholesale, sweeping changes in personnel—is a great strength of this country. There has been a debate going on throughout my political lifetime, and I suspect for a long time before, about whether we should change that and introduce scope for much more appointment, along the lines of the American system. There, the senior echelons are removed and appointed by an incoming Administration. We do not believe that we should do that, because the system is capable of being made to work extremely well. We are pleased that the Bill will entrench the duty of impartiality, and we accept and support the case that has been made that the existence of special advisers, who are now desirably to be controlled by a code protected by statute, provides civil servants with a protection against their impartiality being eroded by Ministers. However, if we are to put into statute an obligation on civil servants to be impartial, there should ideally be a symmetrical requirement on Ministers to respect that impartiality. There were ripples of unease at the weekend when The Sunday Times reported that Lord Mandelson had sent a letter around Whitehall that appeared—I would always want to give the noble Lord the benefit of the doubt—to suggest that he was urging the civil servants who form the Government's communications operation to deploy what are effectively Labour party slogans in the sensitive period in the run-up to a general election. That would risk abusing civil service impartiality and it is right that the head of the civil service should treat very seriously any attempt to erode it. Governments will always test those boundaries—that is kind of in the nature of things—but it is important that the Cabinet Secretary, who is the head of the civil service, is robust in resisting it. If the Bill goes through before the general election, as we hope it will, there will be some statutory reinforcement of his role in protecting that impartiality. It is important that we understand what is meant by this concept of impartiality. It obviously does not mean independence in the sense of civil servants being empowered to do what on earth they like. The obligation of impartiality is to deliver what the lawful Government of the day lawfully set out as their policies. It is important that Ministers listen to officials' advice. They should seek it confidently, and be willing to challenge and interrogate it. They are not obliged to take it, but they should always seek it and hear it. I recently spoke about the episode in the life of this Government when the Prime Minister, when he was Chancellor of the Exchequer, sought to introduce his tax credits scheme. It is now well attested that officials in the Treasury and the Inland Revenue advised very strongly that his proposal could not be administered without risk of fraud, and almost more importantly, of very serious error. He persisted and said, "I don't care. This is my policy. You're the civil servants, you go and deliver it." He ignored the advice. The result was a system that has caused immense distress and human misery to hundreds of thousands of hard-working people on low incomes, who suddenly found themselves traumatised—that is not an exaggeration—when they received demands from the Revenue to repay several thousand pounds in overpaid tax credits. Those hard-working people had done their best to do the right thing. That episode was the result of a Minister—an arrogant Minister, I would say—not listening to the advice that he was given by civil servants, who were not being political but were simply giving impartial advice about the effects of implementing a particular policy in a particular way.