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8.5 pm
Ms Claire Ward (Watford): I welcome the contents of the Queen's Speech, which builds on the Government's excellent progress to date. It contains many measures that will further improve the life of my constituents, and particularly their education and business opportunities. Today the House has the opportunity to debate two of the most important issues--education and home affairs. I should like to concentrate on the latter.
First, I agree with many of the points of my hon. Friend the Member for Mitcham and Morden (Siobhain McDonagh) on the Representation of the People Bill, which sets the ball rolling for what I believe will be a chance to revolutionise our democracy and open up our electoral processes. The rolling register means that people would no longer have to register from where they live by 10 October. That system is archaic nonsense and should be removed as soon as possible. It denies many people the chance to have a vote.
For most people who are moving at that time of year, filling in an electoral form is the last thing on their mind, especially if the election to which it relates is not until the following May or even later. They are unlikely to take any real interest until a party canvasser appears at their door. As those of us who regularly partake in that activity know, by then it is often too late to do anything about a failure to register in time for the election for which we are canvassing. Changing that process to make it easier for people to get on to the electoral register will change the nature of the register and encourage more people to take part in elections because they will have the opportunity to do so.
The changes proposed to access to registers are also important. Those of us who receive a load of junk mail from companies who have bought the register, whether in paper or electronic form, know how infuriating it is to have our address and details so accessible. However, a more important aspect is the safety of many people who wish to remain anonymous on the electoral register. Is it right, in this day and age, that women who are escaping from domestic violence should lose their chance to vote because they are too scared to put themselves on a public register? They know that their ex-husband or ex-partner has a rough idea of where they live and the schools to which their children go and need only look through the register at the local library to find them. There must be greater opportunity for people to remain anonymous on the electoral register. We must ensure not only that those people are protected but that they have a chance to vote.
Mr. Simon Hughes:
I understand the hon. Lady's specific point. However, does she agree that if we move towards the presumption that people can conceal where they live for voting purposes, there is a danger that pop stars, sports personalities and politicians can conceal where they live just because they want to? There is a duty on most of us to make where we live known, and I ask her to agree that there should be very rare exceptions to the principle that people should have their registered address publicly available, even if people cannot be allowed to buy a copy of the register for commercial purposes.
Ms Ward:
I agree with the point about commercial purposes, but people should be able to ask not to have
In the past, we have not tackled the issue of absent voting, but I hope that we will have the chance to do so in this Bill. Why should we have to provide reasons in order to be allowed to vote by postal ballot? In many countries--particularly in America--people can vote by postal ballot for any reason or, indeed, for no reason. Twenty-five per cent. of the electorate of California vote by post up to two weeks before polling day. That would change the way in which we try to convince people to vote for us. We could not leave important messages to the last couple of days and to last-minute party political broadcasts--although perhaps that is not a bad thing.
We should make it easier for people to vote. One concern I have about the Bill is that the cost of the pilot projects will be borne by local authorities, which have many other things on which they want to spend their money on and many priorities on which they have to spend. I am concerned that pilot projects that enable people to vote at railway stations or supermarkets and at weekends or at different times will be pushed further down the list of priorities. I hope that the Government will consider the issue carefully.
We should not limit our imagination when thinking of ways to encourage people to participate in elections. We should not just consider ballot boxes in supermarkets and train stations. Why not give people the chance to vote electronically from anywhere in the country so that their vote is registered in the area in which they live? Why not consider the possibility of using existing lottery terminals? We should give people access to that technology if it encourages them to vote. We should not limit ourselves to the ideas that have been suggested to date.
On the issue of the mode of trial, I should declare an interest as I shall be taking leave from the House tomorrow to go through the formal admissions process as a solicitor. I was qualifying as a solicitor before I came to the House, and finally managed to achieve that some time ago, but only tomorrow will I go through the formal admissions process. As a solicitor who holds very dear the idea of justice and the right to a fair trial, I must express some concern about the legislation announced in the Queen's Speech.
Being a juror is an important role for people to play. As hon. Members, we are excluded from serving on a jury, but Jury Service is another way of increasing participation in society and in citizenship. Many of the measures that the Government are considering would encourage citizenship, and being a juror is an important part of that. I would be concerned if there were any moves to reduce people's chances serving as jurors and taking the responsibility that that entails.
I am also concerned that the right to elect for jury trial will be removed, and defendants will have to appeal to the Crown court to determine whether they are entitled to a jury trial. In deciding whether to allow a case to go to appeal, the magistrate must consider the reputation and livelihood of the defendant. A 19-year-old unemployed male may have little reputation and little livelihood and may not be given the same benefit of the doubt as a Member of this House or the other place, or a member of a worthy profession who is a defendant before a magistrates court. The Government must consider that important issue.
We were told that it is important to reduce costs. I for one want to consider carefully how we can reduce costs. I would be interested to know, either when the Secretary of State for Education and Employment winds up the debate or when the relevant legislation comes before the House, whether the costs of the appeal process and the delays that may be caused by appeals to the Crown court clogging up the rest of the system could outweigh any savings made by removing the right of defendants to opt for a jury trial.
There is no doubt that magistrates are still not representative of the society in which we live. I welcome the Lord Chancellor's recognition of that fact, and his attempts to change it. We must accept that change will take some time. It takes time to encourage people from different communities to become magistrates, and it takes time to get them fully trained and through the selection process. It also takes time for those people to achieve a position of authority in magistrates courts. I hope that my right hon. Friend the Home Secretary will look into those issues carefully. He has made it clear that he has changed his opinion on this matter in the past couple of years. I am sure that he would not have done so lightly. I hope that, over the coming weeks when the legislation is going through Parliament, he will be able to convince other hon. Members of his argument. I shall follow the passage of the legislation with great interest, and I shall want to be sure that, in seeking to reduce costs and to spend money on our criminal justice process efficiently, we are not compromising justice.
I welcome the race relations legislation announced in the Queen's Speech. I hope that it will reassure ethic minority communities that the Government will not tolerate racism in any form or at any level. It is about time that we had such legislation. I am sorry that it has taken the death of Stephen Lawrence to make the country and its institutions wake up to the problems of racism. I hope that we will introduce that legislation as quickly as possible.
Mr. Peter Brooke (Cities of London and Westminster):
I enjoyed the speech of the hon. Member for Watford (Ms Ward). I shall not rehearse the observations that I made on the first day of the debates on the Lords amendments to the Greater London Authority Bill, when I recited various facts about the Westminster elections in 1784 and 1846, which were, if I may say so, more flexible than the present arrangements and made elections a great deal more interesting. I assume that they have been swept away because of the evils of conservatism, and what is proposed in the Queen's Speech will be radical modernisation, but I will not go back to that.
I was gratified by the hon. Lady's willingness for the identity of people whose security might be affected to be protected on the electoral register. That has not always been the case. When I was in some danger as a result of
service in Northern Ireland, the Labour party declined to allow me to register my address as other than the address at which I was living.
I shall address my remarks primarily to higher education, in part because my brain cannot stretch to the mass of Home Office legislation that the Government are seeking to carry in this Session of Parliament. I also want to draw attention to current parliamentary inattention to higher education and its most important place in our country's future, which the Government's own structure sometimes disguises. Before I do so, however, as this is a debate on the Gracious Speech, let me allude briefly to the opening of Wednesday's debate.
On Wednesday, my right hon. Friend the Leader of the Opposition made an outstanding speech--one whose pointedness was caught by Labour Members, who could not prevent themselves from smiling again and again after sally after sally. What defence the Government could muster was that my right hon. Friend's speech was stronger on humour than on policies. The immediate rebuttal was that the Government's policies were the subject of the debate, but an equally apposite rebuttal would be that it is very difficult to be funny unless there is something to be funny about--and the Government are providing an even larger target in that category than the Bills with which the Home Office is presenting us.
If I may put it neutrally, the Prime Minister made a less good speech. His heart did not seem to be in it. The speech reminded me of G. K. Chesterton's remarks about Henry James, to the effect that a spectacular level of tension was created in whole half-hour periods in the novels during which absolutely nothing happened. The Prime Minister was, inevitably, less funny than my right hon. Friend. In so far as he attempted light-heartedness, we experienced our second exposure of recent time to his parliamentary dame cheerleader act, which frankly demeans and trivialises his office.
If the Home Office features heavily in the programme for this Session, higher education features scarcely at all. That is not necessarily a bad thing--I am in favour of less legislation rather than more--but I have remarked in business questions that higher education hardly figures nowadays in oral questions to Ministers representing the Department for Education and Employment. I do not think that that is because higher education has become less important. The Chancellor of the Exchequer still shows interest in it, and the Prime Minister has not noticeably disowned "education, education, education". I suspect that the subject has disappeared from the Chamber because the Prime Minister is so short of talent in the parliamentary Labour party that he has to maintain key ministerial portfolios in the House of Lords--a variation on his usual dismissive attitude to that Chamber. Lady Blackstone has held the higher education portfolio since the general election.
The television game shows that stretch out suspense through unwon prizes could profitably ask contestants to name the Ministers who have held the higher education portfolio in the House of Commons since May 1997. Higher education does not appear in the title of any Minister in the list of ministerial responsibilities--which, after four months of joined-up purdah, the Cabinet Office has at last generously vouchsafed to us.
I have quoted before in the House the observations of the Liberal peer, the publication of whose memoirs was held up for three weeks because the printers had run out
of the capital I. If I allude to my constituency interests in this context, it is to prevent myself from being subject to the charge of not having alluded to them, rather than because I wish to emulate that Liberal peer. I am, in chronological order, a senior fellow of the Royal College of Art, a presentation fellow of King's college London, an honorary fellow of Queen Mary and Westfield college, a lay member of the University of London council, a former Robert Birley lecturer at City university--where I serve on the court, as I do at Imperial college--and an honorary DLitt of the university of Westminster.
I claim no personal credit for that cursus honorum, other than that my constituency has more higher education than any other constituency in the country. I can claim, however, that it was in my constituency, in the last century, that many of the institutional vehicles that have been delivering lifelong learning--long before the present Government came to office--were created.
When I was a Higher Education Minister in the mid-1980s, I sought to persuade the then Secretary of State, the late great Sir Keith Joseph, to take a graduation ceremony at what were then polytechnics so that he could see the immense range of graduands--in regard to age, gender and race--who were involved. In the last 12 months, I have done the same twice in my constituency, and, so far, the range has not changed. On the second occasion, a distinguished American academic from the university of California in Los Angeles confessed to being similarly impressed by the mixture.
It is one of the glories of our system that so many mature students participate in it. In that regard, it is second only to the United States. I am glad to hear of the Government's latest financial infusion into the university system, especially in relation to mature students; but--if this phrase is not regarded as being unduly provocative in today's debate--the jury must still be out in considering the extent to which the immediately prior financial arrangements are currently discouraging mature students from entering the system.
Clearly, mature student numbers are down initially, especially in the arts, humanities, languages and social sciences--languages being especially threatened, because of their greater cost factor. The figures for second-year returners are also down. Ministers will be aware of the link established by a professional study between student mental health and the effect of financial anxieties.
In the last Parliament, the two major parties agreed on the appointment of the Dearing commission. The commission rendered a notable service to the nation, but the appointment of its eponymous chairman, whom I greatly admire, meant ineluctably that lifelong learning would be at its heart. There was nothing wrong in that ipso facto--other countries have addressed retraining and lifelong learning better than we have--but the commission was also charged with considering higher education, the style and pace of which is set by the greatest universities in the land. After the report, I was left with no little concern that the health of our greatest universities had not been adequately addressed.
On this morning's "Today" programme, I heard the Secretary of State for Education and Employment express his pleasure that our most prestigious universities were responding warmly to the challenges inherent in the "excellence in cities" concept; but I continue to fear that,
unless our greatest universities remain wholly competitive internationally, their response to this challenge or that will become--ironically--increasingly academic.
The motion refers to "unnecessary restrictions on teachers". One of those restrictions is pay. I do not hold a total brief for the Association of University Teachers--not least because, during the two and a half years in which I was Higher Education Minister, it did not notice that I had made a speech about university pay in 1978, when my party was in opposition, which it could usefully have quoted back at me--but everything that the Government are doing in further and higher education will prove to be irrelevant if they do not address the real problems of recruiting, motivating and retaining university teachers in engineering, information technology, medicine and teacher education.
A second restriction on university teachers runs the risk of becoming unnecessary. I allude to the amount of regulation that now applies to the quality of higher- education courses. The Minister will know how many failures in university courses have been found after intensive investigations over several years. My impression is that the figure is between 1 per cent. and 2 per cent., but let me make a series of observations.
First, the present system of numerical scores for departmental performance on quality and standards, which immediately become league tables, is distorting university behaviour. I hope that Ministers will be responsive to alternative qualitative proposals by vice-chancellors.
Secondly, the Government are keen that we attract more overseas students, yet the proposed categories for rating of departmental quality under the Quality Assurance Agency for Higher Education, which I understand to be "excellent," "acceptable," and "not acceptable," with the vast majority of provision in the middle category, will crucify UK marketing of British higher education, in competition with that in the United States and Australia, which have no such comparable marking schemes.
A similar danger attends the proposal to cease to call many masters courses, especially conversion ones, masters. That will carry a massive risk to the UK MBA degree--I declare an interest as a Harvard business school MBA when there were no business schools here--if American universities have no plans to redefine, or to rename their own MBA degrees; the United States is the centre of the MBA world.
Finally--it is especially an unnecessary restriction on teachers--the cost of the quality system is potentially disproportionate. In one university in my constituency, a recent investigation cost more than £100,000 and diverted teaching staff for weeks from what they would normally do in either teaching or updating material.
Restrictions on teachers can also take the form of an absence of students. I hope that Ministers are looking at how far the current funding arrangements, with their concentration on well-paid jobs taken after graduation to repay debt, are pushing students, often presumably on parental advice, into vocational courses with short-term attractions and away from liberal arts degrees that might serve students better in the longer run.
My best calculation is that I have 75 weeks, plus injury time, left in the House before I leave it at the general election. I propose to devote such time as I can in that period to exploring higher education questions, as a one-Member campaign against its neglect in the Chamber.
As I know from personal experience, officials preparing parliamentary answers for Ministers sometimes annotate them, "It is not known why the question has been asked. The Member asking it has shown no prior interest in the subject." Ministers always know most about the subjects to which they attend when they are Parliamentary Under-Secretaries of State and there will still be a handful of officials at the Department for Education and Employment who will remember my inexhaustible curiosity about higher education detail as it underlay policy 15 years ago.
In the meantime, I am pleased by the Government's intention to legislate for special educational needs, a subject that the Select Committee on Northern Ireland Affairs has looked at in the current Parliament.
There will be much to debate on the Bill to establish a new Learning and Skills Council, about which I notice the Association of London Government has been critical. My curiosity about that bedrock Bill for lifelong learning is about how much time is being given to finding out what sort of lifelong learning people really wish to do.
I close with another constituency issue. There is nothing in the Queen's Speech about curbing illegal vendors in the royal parks and on the apron forecourt in front of Buckingham palace. I realise that the absence of such a reference may be disguised by that familiar sentence:
"Other measures will be laid before you."
If that measure, about which I have been chasing the Secretary of State for Culture, Media and Sport for two years--having at the same time secured Opposition Front-Bench support for it--does not appear soon, the right hon. Gentleman and his fellow Ministers in the Department will, in the most comprehensive manner, cease to be able to claim that they are entitled to regard themselves as being among the list of Her Majesty's Ministers in the fullest sense of that traditional phrase.
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