Queen’s Speech — House of Lords, 2016-05-24
Topic: Government Operations
Paul Tyler (Liberal Democrats, Centre to centre-left): My Lords, I so enthusiastically endorse everything that the noble Lord, Lord Richard, has said that I can now rip out at least one page of my speech. There are very few issues of great substance in the gracious Speech in terms of the constitutional challenges that the country faces, so I take the advice of the noble Lord, Lord Fowler, who was here earlier. He said in the debate last Thursday: "It may well be that the most significant words in the Queen’s Speech yesterday were that, ‘other measures will be laid before you’" I have met those words before and they are often the most important part of the gracious Speech. I will come back to some obvious omissions in a moment. Meanwhile, in the limited time available I am certainly not going to speculate on what exactly is meant by the extraordinarily meaningless statement about the Strathclyde review. Since there is no Bill attached and any attempt to legislate would be fraught with procedural and political obstacles, we can only guess at what this is supposed to foreshadow. The Government’s explanatory statement is at best ambiguous: "the sovereignty of Parliament" refers to the whole institution; namely, both Houses. It is quite separate of course from the primacy of the House of Commons, where it is simply a convention within that whole. The noble Lord, Lord Fowler, again rightly entered a very proper corrective: "We do not want the primacy of the House of Commons translated into the primacy of the Executive—the primacy of the Government unchecked".—[Official Report, 19/5/16; cols. 43-44.] I prefer this advice to that of the noble Lord, Lord Wakeham I turn to the omissions from the gracious Speech. Two matters will have to be dealt with by Private Members’ Bills. I had hoped to reintroduce the Private Member’s Bill of our much-missed colleague Eric, Lord Avebury, to end the ludicrous hereditary by-elections, but frankly I was pipped at the post. We have heard from the noble Lord, Lord Grocott, on that subject. When the very temporary arrangement of the by-elections was mooted in 1999, my noble friend Lord Rodgers of Quarry Bank, then speaking on behalf of our group, ensured that we Liberal Democrats never signed up to the by-elections. Instead, we preferred to insist that all the remaining 92 hereditary Members would automatically be converted into Life Peers. That would be much simpler. For my part, I intend to help the Government with another topical and relevant set of reforms. Since Ministers do not seem to have been able to move sufficiently speedily to a comprehensive reform of party funding, I am sure that they will welcome, as they usually do, some private enterprise assistance. Members of your Lordships’ House will recall that an almost universal welcome was given to the recommendations of the special Select Committee chaired by the noble Lord, Lord Burns, in the last Session. These were almost all unanimously agreed by the committee, cross-party, and were hailed as meticulously fair by colleagues in all parts of your Lordships’ House. Ministers in both Houses lauded the noble Lord, Lord Burns, and the rest of us, praising our conclusions. Indeed, the Government backed down when faced with amendments to their Trade Union Bill based on those recommendations Paragraph 138 of that same Select Committee report, so warmly endorsed by Ministers and Members in both Houses, reads as follows: "Whether or not clause 10 is enacted, in whatever form, the political parties should live up to their manifesto commitments and make a renewed and urgent effort to seek a comprehensive agreement on party funding reform. We urge the Government to take a decisive lead and convene talks itself, rather than waiting for them to emerge" I am sure that the Government really want to get on with the job because that would fulfil their 2015 manifesto promise There might be advantages in terms of transparency and public engagement if we started that process in your Lordships’ House. That is why I decided to give the Government a helping hand, hence my Private Member’s Bill, the political parties (funding and expenditure) Bill. I was tempted to read the Long Title but it is rather long, so in the interests of brevity I will give a very quick synopsis: phased introduction of caps on donations; fair funding of parties, incentivising membership and local activity; changes to the rules on nominations at elections; provision for between-election limits on parties’ expenditure; and, crucially, the conferring of powers on the Electoral Commission, including investigation of constituency-level breaches of the law, which is presently and preposterously left to the police This Bill is firmly based on the cross-party draft I prepared and published in 2013, together with prominent Conservative and Labour MPs. However, they should not be held responsible for all its present proposals, because I have updated it and ensured its topicality. For example, we have taken the opportunity to insert the requirements of the Trade Union Act In addition, I propose measures to deal with the current vagueness and confusion surrounding campaign expenditure—nominally part of the nationally controlled budget of the party—which is, in practice, targeted precisely to support a particular candidate in a particular constituency. All of us in your Lordships’ House who have in the past contested elections will be well aware that we and our agents have always been told that we have to be absolutely clear that we are responsible for every penny spent in support of our candidature, otherwise we end up in the election court Over the last two years or so, experience has dramatically demonstrated that these restrictions are now routinely circumvented by so-called national spending, under the very high PPERA limits. Unsolicited material—mailshots and other directly addressed material—costing millions of pounds has bypassed the constituency expense limit, which was first legislated for as long ago as 1883 The current inadequate investigations must obviously lead to careful clarification of the law. My Bill is a modest offering to Ministers to enable them to keep their manifesto promise. I hope that the Minister, when winding up, will confirm that the Government will welcome recommendations from the Electoral Commission on how existing regulations could and should be updated.