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3.6 pm
Mr. Tam Dalyell (Linlithgow): I hope that the hon. Member for South Staffordshire (Sir Patrick Cormack) will forgive me if I do not pursue the issue of the appointment of a Scot to the English Department of Health. That may be a matter for another day.
I have been sitting here since 12.40 pm and I did not intend to speak. However, I am becoming increasing troubled about a specific matter: the relationship of the civil service with some of the new Ministers. My hon. Friend the Parliamentary Secretary, Department for Constitutional Affairs has a good record on serious civil service problems and I am especially glad to speak to him quietly.
The Secretary of Secretary of State for Transport and Secretary of State for Scotland, my right hon. Friend the Member for Edinburgh, Central (Mr. Darling) is my parliamentary neighbour. He is one of the most competent Ministers and has always been superb at organising his time. No one in the House organises time to greater purpose than my right hon. Friend, whom I know well. I am bothered not about time but about civil service responsibility. I am worried about a civil servant in one Department being responsible to a Minister in another and vice versa. The hon. Member for Beaconsfield (Mr. Grieve) mentioned that in an intervention.
Given our tradition of Departments, what is the position of Scotland Office civil servants who are responsible to another Department, yet have a Minister in a third Department who answers questions in the House of Commons? There is a genuine difficulty with that. There may be a solution, but it is currently convenient that the Secretary of State for Transport is an extremely competent Scot. That may not always be the case; Ministers change.
What will be future of the Scotland Office? Residual powers exist. Even my right hon. Friend the Member for Carrick, Cumnock and Doon Valley (Mr. Foulkes) will
confess that some reserved powers have to be tackled in the House. We might have different views on other aspects of devolution, but surely we are united on that.The issue is who exercises these powers. If, by chance, there is a suitable arrangement at a particular point in time at which the Secretary of State for Transport is in a position to do the job of Secretary of State for Scotland because he is a Scot and because he is intellectually and organisationally able to do it, that is fine. But this is not a built-in situation that will continue for ever. In all seriousness, therefore, I ask the Minister to tell me—possibly when he winds up, or possibly later—how we are to reconcile something which so far as I know is absolutely new to British constitutional politics? That is the situation in which a civil servant regularly—not on an emergency basis—has to be responsible to a Minister in another Department. If that is the case, there will have to be changes in the way in which the Government operate. We have a system, but a fundamental difference is now being introduced. I just want to know how this question is to be resolved.
3.11 pm
Mr. Francis Maude (Horsham): Like my hon. Friend the Member for South Staffordshire (Sir Patrick Cormack), I regret the absence from this part of the debate of the new Leader of the House and continuing Secretary of State, who has taken both his presences elsewhere. I should have liked to take the opportunity to congratulate him in person on his happy event last Saturday, and on the acquisition of another job. In the private sector, that is known as "going plural". It would be interesting to know at what point he proposes to draw the line, and whether he is going to acquire more offices along the way.
I also agree with what my hon. Friend said about the tone of the speech of the new Leader of the House today. I felt a good deal of sympathy for the right hon. Gentleman, and I have quite a high regard for him, but, for him, it was like being put in to bat on a wicket, and going out to the middle of the pitch only to find that the captain of his own team had dug up the whole pitch. I think that that is as unhappy an experience as he will have had. He is normally an assured performer, but he was most ill at ease today. And rightly so, because he is being put in to bat to defend something that is very hard to defend.
I also regret that he tried to smear almost everyone who was raising these issues as being somehow reactionary. Frankly, it is a long time since I have been called a reactionary; the normal term of abuse for me is "moderniser". I certainly see nothing sacrosanct about 1,400 years of history that would make it impossible to contemplate change. Plenty of things were commonplace 1,400 years ago which have now happily been got rid of. The idea that an office that has existed for that length of time should be preserved simply on that basis is plainly absurd.
However, the current situation is a very unhappy one indeed. I rather wish that the new Leader of the House had done today what he has done in many other circumstances, and been bruisingly honest and admitted that this had been a cock-up, and that the whole process had been abrasive and insulting and had alienated huge numbers of people both in the political world and
outside who might, if it had been approached in a more intelligent and sensitive way, have been garnered into a gathering consensus. There is not much in the proposals that is inherently objectionable; it has just been done in the most crass way. It would have been better for the Leader of the House, on his debut event, just to admit that and say, "Let's start again, draw a line and see what we can rescue from this wreck."I should like to separate out some of the ingredients of this dog's breakfast. There are a number of issues involved which are not linked to each other. First, let me deal with the issue of the Secretaries of State for Wales and Scotland. I do not regard it as improper for their roles to become part-time and to be undertaken by Ministers carrying other responsibilities. It was pointed out in what I think was meant to be a killer point that that was our policy at the last election. It seems perfectly sensible to do that as part of the upshot of the working out of the devolution settlement, and I do not see that as inherently difficult.
There is confusion on this issue, however. The point made by the Father of the House just now—the only point that he made in his short speech—was very important. There has been—to my mind, there remains—a good deal of confusion about how the new arrangements will work. In what sense will the Wales Office and the Scotland Office be in the new Department for Constitutional Affairs? Will there be physical co-location? Apparently not. We are told that the staff are not physically going to move in there. Is it simply that the civil servants will become part of the broader structure within the new Department? That might have something to recommend it, and it was certainly the only justification that the Leader of the House raised for this issue. I would have no particular objection to that proposal, but it has not been made clear whether that is to happen.
Who is the permanent secretary to whom those civil servants will report for pay and rations? That raises an important point about accountability, because civil servants do not report to Ministers for their pay, rations and promotion; they very properly report to other independent, impartial civil servants. What is the route of responsibility and accountability for those civil servants? It ought not to be impossible to devise something that makes sense, and with which the House would be comfortable, but we are nowhere near having had this made clear to us. This is another example of how this issue was dodged up as an expedient to sort out some personnel issues for the Government, rather than being a well-planned, well-thought-through development of the devolution settlement.
Mr. Leslie: To help the right hon. Gentleman, may I tell him that the new Department for Constitutional Affairs will have a permanent secretary, Sir Hayden Phillips? He will also be the permanent secretary for the Scotland Office and the Wales Office, whose officials will to all intents and purposes come under the Department for Constitutional Affairs in terms of pay and rations, to use the right hon. Gentleman's phrase.
Mr. Maude: I am grateful to the Minister for making that clear, but that does not address the problem that is
inherent in that arrangement—namely that the civil servants have to report for their pay, rations, promotions and conditions to the head of one Department, while their political responsibility, in policy terms, is to the head of another Department. It should not be beyond the wit of man to resolve that problem. It has not been resolved, however, and it needs to be.
Mr. Garnier: Was my right hon. Friend not further disturbed by the fact that the Secretary of State earlier justified this constitutional change-around by saying that it would provide "career certainty" for civil servants? That may or may not be a good reason for reorganising a Department, but it is certainly not a good basis for reorganising the constitution.
Mr. Maude: I gave the Leader of the House credit for having made a slip of the tongue at that point. I am sure that he did not quite mean "career certainty".
It is true that these vestigial Departments are unlikely to have a large enough group of civil servants for there to be meaningful career paths for them, so there is a case for putting them into a larger group for those purposes. There is, however, an issue that is as yet unresolved about how to reconcile a reporting line for career purposes that goes in one direction with a reporting line in terms of policy that goes in another.
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