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Mr. Bercow: The right hon. Lady is making a stoical defence of the Government's position to the best of her ability. However, a certain neurosis seems to underlie the Government's stance. I invite the right hon. Lady to reflect on the salience of her reference to the "degree of choice" available to people. Does she not concede that it is rather peculiar to celebrate the merits of choice, and to offer people a series of options, but then for the Minister for Local Government and the Regions to be unable to guarantee from the Dispatch Box that the preferred option will always be honoured in practice? The Minister thinks that his arbitrary discretion should hold sway over the local will, in many cases. Does not the right hon. Lady think that that is contradictory?
Joyce Quin: The hon. Gentleman earlier tempted my right hon. Friend the Minister down various improbable hypothetical paths. My right hon. Friend was right to resist that teasing, and to say very firmly that he would not want to thwart the will of the majority of people in a region when it came to expressing a choice about establishing a regional assembly. He also said that he would not want to influence the choice of people in areas affected by local government reorganisation as to what form that reorganisation should take.
The hon. Member for Buckingham (Mr. Bercow) in his intervention also said that I was making a stoical defence of the Government's proposals, but I want to make it clear that I am making an enthusiastic defence of them. As long ago as last July, I put forward the idea of a compromise in a newspaper article, and I also spoke firmly in favour of a compromise in this House on 18 December, when it was not Government policy. I therefore hope that the hon. Gentleman will at least admit that I have advocated this line for some considerable time. The compromise is a constructive move towards unitary government, which I and the majority of hon. Members strongly support. At the same time, it avoids what would be an uncomfortable option for those of us in existing urban and unitary areas—that is, overriding the wishes of people in two-tier areas.
Mr. Bercow: The right hon. Lady knows that I always try to be fair in debate. I would not want to impugn her integrity, or to misrepresent what appears to be a consistent position—with which, as it happens, I disagree. I entirely accept that the right hon. Lady is consistent, although she has the rather dubious distinction of being consistently wrong. Her position contrasts somewhat with that of the hon. Member for Kingston and Surbiton (Mr. Davey), who is usually wrong, and in this case is inconsistent. My hon. Friend the Member for Runnymede and Weybridge
(Mr. Hammond) has very usefully explained how Liberal Democrats in this House and the other place are now united in fraternal detestation of each others' guts.
Joyce Quin: I am sure that the hon. Member for Kingston and Surbiton (Mr. Davey) will deal with those matters when he rises to speak. I am glad that the hon. Member for Buckingham recognises the consistency of my argument, even though he does not agree with it. However, in all fairness, I must say that Liberal Democrat and Labour supporters of devolution in the north-east of England have felt that the proposal was a sensible way forward, and indeed they advocated it at an early stage. The hon. Gentleman can impugn motives, or otherwise, as he chooses, but there is a long history to the idea under discussion, and that should be recognised in this debate.
In conclusion, I once again welcome the amendments. They greatly improve the Bill. They take a lot of the sting out of the complications arising from linking regional and local government, and provide a very sensible way forward.
Mr. Edward Davey: I begin by paying tribute to the right hon. Member for Gateshead, East and Washington, West (Joyce Quin). She has argued in favour of amendments similar to those passed in the Lords, especially the one moved by my noble Friend Baroness Hamwee. The support given by people such as the right hon. Lady was vital in persuading the Government to accept the amendments. I therefore pay tribute to the contribution made by the right hon. Lady and other Labour Members to this success.
The amendments significantly improve the Bill. I shall say a little more about the compromise involved in a second, but the issue has been progressed in a way that people who will be asked to vote in the referendums will see as sensible and valuable.
We were faced with a Government who were not going to accept the principled position of the Liberal Democrats. We wanted to decouple local government reorganisation from the referendum on elected regional assemblies. That would still be my preference, but compromise is necessary in politics. Instead of negotiating with the Government on the solution that has been proposed, we had two other options. We could have held out for total decoupling and said that we would not agree with anything if the Government did not accept non-unitary government in the areas that opt for regional assemblies. If we had done that, the Bill would have been lost and regional government would have died.
What would have happened? We would have been left with the quangos that already exist in the regions, many of which were set up by the previous Conservative Government and have no democratic accountability. We believe in regional government because we believe in regional democracy, and we want it to be accountable to people in the regions. We did not want to lose the Bill, because we would have lost the chance for regional democracy.
The other alternative is that the Government could have said that they want the Bill and that, with no compromise forthcoming, they would push it through using the Parliament Acts. That would have meant that no improvements to the Bill would have been possible; neither of those alternatives was very inviting. We believed that getting involved in constructive discussions with the Government was the sensible way forward. The Government proposal was not our preferred option, but it was as near as we could possibly get to it.
3.15 pm
Mr. Hammond: I have been listening very carefully to the hon. Gentleman, but he is being slightly disingenuous in citing the possibility that the Government might use the Parliament Acts. He knows that the Government, almost uniquely with this Bill, cannot afford any time slippage. They have set out their agenda for the next general election and they want a referendum to be held next year. They simply would not be able to rely on use of the Parliament Acts.
Mr. Davey: The Government could have taken that decision, or they could have decided to withdraw the Bill, as Lord Rooker said. We must remember that No. 10 did not want this Bill at all. The Deputy Prime Minister had to negotiate very hard with No. 10 to get the Bill in the first place. The Deputy Prime Minister had to compromise with No. 10, for which the bottom line was unitary government. Faced with that reality, Liberal Democrats decided—politics being the art of the possible—to compromise, like the Deputy Prime Minister.
Mr. Don Foster: My hon. Friend may have miscounted, as he said that three options existed. I draw his attention to a fourth option—we could speak out strenuously against something and then, as the Conservatives are doing, not even bother to vote against it.
Mr. Davey: My hon. Friend is exactly right. He exposes the nonsense that is the Conservative position, and I hope to go further in that respect.
It should come as no surprise that the Liberal Democrats have negotiated with the Government on constitutional reform issues. We were part of a Cabinet Committee that sat for several years. My right hon. Friend the Member for Berwick-upon-Tweed (Mr. Beith) was a member of that Committee, which dealt with constitutional reform in respect of the Scottish Parliament, the Welsh Assembly, freedom of information and human rights. Liberal Democrats were involved in negotiations on all those major constitutional reforms. This measure is part of that tradition.
Such compromises have not prevented the Liberal Democrats from opposing the Government on many issues; for example, Iraq, or tuition and top-up fees. In no way do we agree with every part of the Government's agenda, but, when we do, we try to work with them to reach a compromise. That is grown-up politics.
The hon. Member for Runnymede and Weybridge (Mr. Hammond) quoted my noble Friend, Lord Greaves, but, interestingly, he did not cite his noble Friend Lord Waddington, who said:
- "My Lords, I thank the noble Baroness for tabling the amendment"—
- "which appears to be an important step forward, allowing people the opportunity to say what form of unitary local government they want in their areas."
- "But, assuming that the Government will not resile from their determination to use their voting power to ensure that the price of having a referendum is to have unitary local government, does not my noble friend agree with me that, if we are eventually left in that position, it is better that local people should have the opportunity to choose what form of unitary government they should have . . .?"—[Official Report, House of Lords, 7 April 2003; Vol. 647, c. 17–19.]
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