My Lords, I declare my interest as a member of the Constitution Committee. I too pay tribute to my noble friend Lord Lang for the way he has moved the Motion and for his most effective chairmanship of the committee. In the time available, I wish to pursue two points that merit a response from the Government. Both derive from the two reports of the Constitution Committee that are before us.
As we have heard already, the basic message at the heart of the report on The Union and Devolution is that instead of being defensive, we need to spend more time saying what is right with the union. There is a clear, positive case to be made. As the report says, the union has brought stability, peace and prosperity to the United Kingdom.
I was a member of the Conservative Political Centre National Policy Group on the Constitution that produced a report, Strengthening the United Kingdom, in 1996. My noble friend Lord Dunlop was also a member, and the committee was serviced by my noble friend Lord Lexden. We emphasised the case for the union. We argued that it reconciled order with personal liberty, and national differences with common citizenship, thanks to one constitutional citizenship established by the union. We also drew out that it creates a constitutional citizenship transcending national and regional parochialism, that it successfully reconciles the ideas of nationalism and nationality and that it promotes cultural diversity and the sharing of rich differences which diversity produces.
I am sure my noble friend the Minister will endorse these essential attributes. I think it important we put them on the record. However, the first point I wish to develop, and invite a response to from my noble friend, derives from another, crucial observation in the report on The Union and Devolution. As it says:
“Proper consideration of the cumulative impact of devolution on the integrity of the Union itself has been lacking”.
This relates to a point that I have pursued for many years, namely the essentially incoherent approach taken by successive Governments to constitutional change.
Changes to the constitution have been disparate and discrete, advocated on their individual merits and not set within a clear view of what type of constitution is appropriate to the United Kingdom.
I was recently invited to pen an article entitled “Constitutional Change: Unfinished Business?”. I argued that it was more appropriate to refer to “never-ending business”, because “unfinished business” implies that there is an end-point. There is presently no end-point, because no Government of recent years have articulated what they are working towards in terms of our constitution. Specific reforms have been advocated, and in most but not all cases implemented, by Governments, and there have been changes that are essentially the product of reacting to different demands. The reaction has been, in constitutional terms, incoherent, with no obvious thought about the impact on other changes. As Professor Charlie Jeffery told the committee:
“We have seen ... a real absence of territorial statecraft—thinking about how the state as a whole can accommodate the demands for decentralisation in its various parts. Unless we do that, we will continue on this ratchet process of gradual disintegration”.
Even within the context of devolution, there is a need to see it within the wider context of the union. As we have heard, we need a clearer articulation of the case for the union: to have a grasp of the principles underpinning that union and determining what government should seek to achieve. Unless we have that, government will spend too much time in firefighting mode. However, it was clear from the committee’s two inquiries—this brings me to my second point—that one impediment to achieving this was the structure of government. As we reported in our 2015 report, responsibility for devolution was dispersed within government, with a lack of effective co-ordination and oversight. Indeed, we said it was extraordinary that the Cabinet Minister stated to be responsible for devolution, the Deputy Prime Minister, was not a member of the Cabinet Committee on that very subject.
After the 2015 election, a Cabinet Committee on Constitutional Reform was established. However, it met only once in nine months, with constitutional issues being cleared instead through the Home Affairs Committee. As we said at paragraph 344 of our 2016 report,
“consideration of constitutional issues as simply one part of the work of the much broader-ranging Home Affairs Cabinet Committee risks the loss of any explicit focus on the constitutional implications of the UK Government’s policies”.
The situation has not improved since. If anything, it has got worse. There is no Cabinet committee dedicated to constitutional reform. There is no committee on devolution. The Government in their much-delayed response to the 2015 report said that,
“issues concerning devolution cut across a large swathe of Government business considered by different Cabinet Committees”.
They said that it was up to Ministers to consider the interests of all citizens of the UK and the impact of all policies on the whole of the UK. That is it. It is in effect conceding that the Government have no structured collective means of looking holistically and proactively at devolution, and more generally the constitution. There is the Minister for the Cabinet Office with responsibility for an overview of constitutional issues, supported by the Minister for the Constitution. Where is the Cabinet Minister—where is the Cabinet
committee?—that has dedicated responsibility for devolution, for addressing what we need to be doing to preserve the union? Where is the Cabinet committee that has responsibility for looking holistically at our constitution?
There is within government an obvious and necessary focus on Brexit. That, though, should not be at the expense at looking at our constitution as a constitution and how the different parts fit within a clear and coherent framework of principles, derived from an understanding of the constitution we want for the United Kingdom. Without that, we are in danger of a never-ending process of disparate and largely reactive changes, resulting in a constitutional framework that no one wants or necessarily understands. How do Brexit, developments in the union, decentralisation in England and demands for a British Bill of Rights fit together within an intellectually coherent view of the constitution we want for the United Kingdom?
We can, I believe, start to get there from some of the principles enunciated in the committee’s 2016 report. There is value, as a witness citing the noble Lord, Lord Hennessy, said, in looking at,
“the issues that bond the union”,
in essence the constitutional citizenship to which I referred in opening. Professor Adam Tomkins, of the University of Glasgow, now an MSP and formerly a legal adviser to the Constitution Committee, said in evidence:
“We really cannot carry on, in the United Kingdom, developing devolution or developing Britain’s territorial governance in silos … Really for me the value of thinking about principles of union constitutionalism is that it gets us, or might help to get us, out of those silos and into the space where we can start thinking about the things that we have in common”.
Getting out the silos and thinking about our constitution as such—as a whole and not simply the sum of its parts—is essential. The Government need to be on the front foot and not hunkering down in their silos.
I shall conclude by putting the two questions that derive from this to my noble friend Lord Duncan. First, echoing the noble and learned Lord, Lord Cullen, could he please delineate the principles that govern constitutional change? As I say, we need a clear and coherent framework, not only to know how to respond to demands for change but to be proactive in making the case for the fundamentals of the British constitution that have served us well and are in danger of being swept away.
Secondly, what plans are there to restructure the process of government to address constitutional change? There needs to be a structure to enable the Government collectively, at Cabinet level, to discuss and agree change within that framework of basic principles. The clear message in both reports from the Constitution Committee is that existing arrangements are not up to the task. These are crucial matters of principle and process that need to be addressed urgently if we are to maintain and promote the union of the United Kingdom.
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