Constitutional Reform and Governance Bill

No, as I want to come to the real burden of my remarks. We have spent quite a lot of time on what even the hon. Member for North-West Norfolk said was a modest proposal, so I would like to make the main points of my argument against it. If the hon. Member for North-East Hertfordshire (Mr. Heald) still wants to intervene after I have made some progress, I will of course give way to him. The main problem with new clause 22 is that it still fails the separation of powers test. The hon. Member for North-West Norfolk said—although I am not sure that he really meant it—that he welcomes how the legislature has become tangled up with the higher reaches of the judiciary. I accept that there has been a certain entanglement, but I certainly do not welcome it, and I think that the British people do not want it. One of the greatest protections of their liberties is that the legislature and the judiciary are not entangled. We are continuing the process of disentangling them as far as we possibly can, and that is the purpose of the establishment of the Supreme Court. I do not want to rehearse all the arguments again, but it is very important that we set out exactly what the chief executive does, as that is the core of the problem. The statute says that it is for the chief executive to manage the non-judicial functions of the Supreme Court, so that its resources are used to provide an efficient and effective system to support it in carrying out its business. I think that everyone should accept that there is a function there to be performed. The chief executive works under the President of the Supreme Court, and again I hope that everyone accepts that, if there is to be a chief executive, that is the correct way for the arrangement to operate. The new clause would increase substantially the time that the President of the Supreme Court must spend managing the non-judicial aspects of the court's functions, thereby reducing the time that this individual—ex officio, they will be talented, skilled and experienced—has to spend on the crucial judicial work that is the court's core role. The new clause also would undermine the very independence that the Supreme Court was founded on. I believe that it is very important that we have a Supreme Court, and that its independence is protected. In the first Constitutional Affairs Committee report of the 2003-04 Session, the Law Lords made it clear that they unanimously regarded it as essential that the court enjoyed corporate independence. They said that""the independence of the judges requires not only that they be free of extraneous pressure but also that the court be institutionally free of administrative pressure"." To that end, the court has been established as a non-ministerial department with its own chief executive, who is also the court's accounting officer, to ensure that there can be no question of interference by the Executive in its day-to-day running. The chief executive, which the new clause would abolish, plays a key role in managing appropriate relationships between the court and branches of Government throughout the UK and assuring proper accountability for the use of public resources—of course, there must be such accountability. If the function were abolished, the Lord Chancellor would have to provide support along the lines of sections 1 and 2 of the Courts Act 2003, which set out the general duty on the Lord Chancellor to ensure that there is an efficient and effective system to support the business of the senior courts, county courts and magistrates courts, and that appropriate services are provided for those courts. Since the new clause does not remove other related provisions of the Constitutional Reform Act 2005, such as section 50, which requires the Lord Chancellor to provide accommodation and other resources, the removal of the chief executive role would bring all those financial accountability responsibilities back to the Lord Chancellor and the Ministry of Justice, compromising the independence of the Supreme Court, cutting right across the justices' own requirements for managerial and financial independence, and re-entangling the legislature and the Executive with the judiciary in precisely the way that we think it is right that they should be disentangled. Finally, the amendment is defective as it leaves intact section 51 of the Act under which the chief executive is responsible for ensuring that""the Court's resources are used to provide an efficient and effective system to support the Court's business"." For all those reasons, I hope the hon. Member for North-West Norfolk (Mr. Bellingham) will withdraw the new clause.