European Union (Withdrawal) Bill — House of Lords, 2018-03-19
Topic: Government Operations
Andrew Adonis (Labour, Centre-left): My Lords, the noble Lord, Lord Shipley, drew attention to a significant weakness in our constitutional arrangements. The paradox of devolution as it has developed in recent decades in respect of Scotland and Wales—and Northern Ireland, to some extent, although it has a more complicated history—is that the greater the degree of formal statutory devolution, the greater the degree of formal statutory consultation with central government As these debates have unfolded in the interminable Committee, which I now think of almost as the committee for public safety on the Bill and which we have held over many weeks, I am struck by the fact that we have devoted huge amounts of time to arrangements with Scotland, Wales and Northern Ireland. They have a population of 10 million between them; England has a population of 53 million and we have spent almost no time on it—indeed, I think this is the first substantive debate we have had, in a very thin Committee at 8 o’clock in the evening, on the arrangements for consulting and liaising with England on devolution. That goes to the heart of the big problem in our constitutional arrangements, which is that sub-national government in England has no formal relationship in terms of statutory bodies or arrangements with central government and is largely ignored. I hope that the Minister, who is very reasonable, will at least reflect on the fact that the responsible leaders of English local authorities who are in the House this evening—including the noble Lord, Lord Porter, on his side—appear to have more confidence in the consultative machinery in place in the European Union than in central government here in London. That is quite a telling sign The bit of English government that I have had most contact with in recent years, as a Minister and politician, is the government of London. The single most significant and positive change made by the British state, in respect of the government of England in the last 20 years, was establishing a Mayor of London with substantial powers and a real degree of autonomy. When I was sitting on the Benches opposite as a Minister, I can say that you took the call of the Mayor of London; he is elected by a million votes and has statutory responsibilities. For other local authority leaders in England, with little formal status—nothing like the clout of the Mayor of London—and no formal machinery in place, it is very hit and miss whether their voice is heard at all in London The paradox of the Brexit vote is that the areas that are the least consulted and engaged with by central government in England—which, to be blunt, is most of England outside the south-east—are also the areas that voted most heavily for Brexit. There is a big and fundamental commentary there on the state of the government of England: whether we complete Brexit next year or not, the substantial unfinished business of constitutional reform in Britain over the coming years will be the government of England outside London. That is not something we will determine at 8 o’clock in the evening in debate on amendments to the EU withdrawal Bill, but it is quite clear that the whole EU withdrawal process has set in train a set of concerns that will be very difficult not to address I want to make one final comment so that we can put the entire constitution on the agenda in one short debate. I suspect that the future of the House of Lords will have a part to play, because if we have proper devolved arrangements for the regions or cities of England—however we choose to provide better government for England—we will have something that starts to resemble a genuine, balanced federation in the United Kingdom. Once we have that, the obvious and logical successor to this rather toothless and nominated House of Lords would be a proper federal second Chamber. Who knows? If we can envisage withdrawing from the European Union, we can certainly envisage having a federal second Chamber of the United Kingdom in our lifetimes.