My Lords, the noble Lord, Lord Hannay, kindly referred to the fact that I was some years ago his predecessor as chairman of the sub-committee of the European committee that deals with matters of home affairs and that general area. I am bound to say that I have spent almost all the 16 years that I have been a Member of your Lordships’ House as a member of one or other of the sub-committees of the European committee, as well as a member over a number of years of the main committee.
The noble Lord, Lord Hannay, spoke of speaking harshly, and I shall speak no less harshly, but not quite on the same issues as those that he talked about. I am not a member of either of the select committees that have produced these reports. I am now a member of Sub-Committee C, which deals with foreign affairs and defence. Years ago, I was chairman of that committee. Over the years, I have had a continued disquiet over the Government’s attitude to the House of Lords and its work. The noble Lord, Lord Hannay, referred to a good many of the reservations that the members of the committees have had about how the Government have responded—and I am talking about Governments of both parties. I shall come to that a little later. I do not believe that the departments involved treat your Lordships’ House as they should.
If I were making a sermon, I would take as my text the Government’s response to House of Commons Paper 683, titled, The UK’s Block Opt-out of pre-Lisbon Criminal Law and Policing Measures, in which the Government say that they,
“thought it necessary to reply to one of the principal criticisms running through your report: a perceived lack of engagement by the Government with Parliament on this issue”.
That would be my text, but then one comes to the two reports that we are discussing. Paper 159, published on 23 April last year, in paragraph 280 says:
“We regret that the Government have not complied with their own undertakings to engage effectively with Parliament regarding the opt-out decision”.
In the second report, to which the noble Lord, Lord Hannay, also referred, which is Paper 69 published on 31 October last year—I am sorry to have to keep quoting these things, but it puts things into proper perspective—the committee states:
“We restate our disappointment that important information about the measures covered by the opt-out was not provided in a timely manner to Parliament and was only made available a few days before both Houses were asked to take decision on the Government’s proposed course of action”.
In the same report, in Chapter 2 and paragraph 106, the committee says:
“We regret that the grounds on which the Government made their selection of measures to seek to rejoin were not set out persuasively in the EMs”—
that is, the explanatory memoranda.
Those are just some examples of when the committee has had anxieties. Those anxieties are also spread among other European Union sub-committees, and we have seen much more blatant examples of incompetence by departments and Ministers in the past. When I was chairman of the committee of which the noble Lord, Lord Hannay, is now chairman, we had a case under the previous Government involving Mr Liam Byrne, who took over a year to reply to one of our letters. The then Leader of the House, the noble Baroness, Lady Ashton, actually named him, with a rebuke on the Floor of your Lordships’ House. I have been a Member of one House or another in this Building for just coming up to 50 years, and I can never remember a senior member of the Government publicly criticising a junior Minister, as she did, before.
We have had yet another case in Sub-Committee C, which I raised with the previous Minister, the noble Lord, Lord Green. We wrote him a letter in November 2012. He did not reply. We sent reminders at staff level the following March, May and August. We then wrote again last October, to find out what was going on. We found almost immediately afterwards that the Government had agreed the text, but we still had not had a reply to our letter of a year earlier. When the noble Lord came to give evidence to the committee, on 21 November last year, it seemed to the committee—I cannot swear that this is true, but there was every indication that it was—that the first the noble Lord had heard of this incompetence was as he was in the passage upstairs coming into the committee, when one of our officials told him and his officials that the matter was likely to be raised.
Those are two examples of Ministers in different Governments taking over a year to reply to our requests and correspondence. Frankly, it just will not do. One cannot help feeling that, just because your Lordships’ House is not so politically confrontational as the House along the corridor, they seem to think that they
can treat it in that dilatory way. I resent that very much indeed. I am no Eurosceptic—philosophically, I tend very much in the opposite direction—so I am not using this argument to push a Eurosceptic line. That is the last thing I would do.
We get far too many overrides. Departments seem to have an unacceptable lack of urgency. Above all, Ministers do not insist. They do not see to it that they enforce proper attitudes towards your Lordships’ House in their departments. When, a few weeks ago, we confronted the noble Lord, Lord Green, with that delay—I got the impression that the poor man was hearing all this for the first time—I asked him, with regard to ministerial control over departments, “Have you ever heard of Sir Thomas Dugdale?” He said that he had. Your Lordships will remember that Sir Thomas was the Minister of Agriculture in the other House who resigned over the Crichel Down affair, which started in the 1940s, because he reckoned that he was in charge of the department, and dilatoriness and sloppiness in departments—which is what we see now—was the ultimate responsibility of Ministers. Your Lordships’ House should not be fobbed off by lack of ministerial control and sloppy departments.
4.50 pm