Select Committee on Constitutional Affairs Minutes of Evidence


Examination of Witness (Questions 280-299)

RT HON JACK STRAW MP

4 JULY 2006

  Q280  Chairman: That is an addition, is it?

  Mr Straw: Neither should you necessarily discourage it. Getting the balance is difficult; it is the exam question that we have given to Sir Hayden Phillips. It is easier to say what you do not want than what you do want. I would like to see perhaps more party funding but not beyond a certain point.

  Q281  Dr Whitehead: It is added value for people's efforts rather than replacement?

  Mr Straw: How one incentivise parties to raise funds themselves and then match them is very important. My personal instinct is that we may want to increase policy development and there may be other appropriate grants to be made. I believe that the Short money is pretty generous as it is at the moment. One may want to change the support that is given at a local level by way of free envelopes and so on, but beyond that I think the most attractive case for additional support for political parties is that of matched funding by one device or another.

  Q282  Keith Vaz: Do you believe that tax relief on small donations, perhaps up to £200, to political parties would make a significant difference to party finances?

  Mr Straw: I cannot give you the figures, but plainly with matched funding some form of tax relief would make a difference. There are the Power proposals whereby you put a tick in the box and the party of your choice then gets some funding.

  Q283  Keith Vaz: What do you think about the proposals to tick a box?

  Mr Straw: I think that a proposal where the general taxpayer is matching or providing an incentive to people to take part in the political process is better than straight grant. I just said to Dr Whitehead that there are some countries that I know of, but will not name, where there are very high levels of state funding of parties. I do not believe that it is good for their democracies. You may resolve one set of problems but you gain all sorts of others and effectively you get state bureaucracies running political parties and all sorts of other problems, including detachment. For the moment, I do not have to decide the merits of tax relief versus the Power proposals, and I shall not do so. Each has advantages and disadvantages. The Power proposals are quite attractive and simple. They would provide a further incentive to parties to get the vote out. People say that it would be difficult to administer. For the life of me I cannot see how because all you do is have another box and you count it at the same time. On the other hand, parties of the extreme right and left would make use of this, just as would the parties represented round this table. Tax relief has obvious advantages. One needs to think about making some arrangements where donations come from those who are not within the tax system.

  Q284  Keith Vaz: In view of your earlier answer about not being in favour of a cap on donations, obviously you disagree with the Power Commission's suggestion of a cap of £10,000 on individual donations.

  Mr Straw: I chose my words carefully. I said that I was sceptical about a cap on donations because I was not sure that the disadvantages were outweighed by the advantages. I do not rule it out altogether. It would be insulting to Sir Hayden Phillips in advance of his case and argument to do so. Nor do I suggest that what Neill said eight years ago is the last word on this. Mr Tyrie is nodding in agreement.

  Q285  Mr Tyrie: Things have changed a little.

  Mr Straw: But what has not changed, as far as I can judge, is the position as far as the trade unions are concerned. There is literally zero evidence on it.

  Keith Vaz: Mr Tyrie wants a cap.

  Q286  Chairman: This is not the end of the story. I am conscious that we may have a couple of divisions fairly shortly, so I want to give you an opportunity to tell us what in the view of the Government are the constitutional functions of the second chamber?

  Mr Straw: I was thinking about that. I was very struck by the view of the fifth report of the Public Administration Committee. I am sorry to quote the competition. In that report it said that as far as the Committee was concerned it was about strengthening Parliament as a whole in relation to the executive that is uniquely powerful in the British system. I believe that it is about strengthening Parliament as a whole. I do not happen to believe that strengthening the role of Parliament involves a zero sum versus government. I am quite clear that good governance is enhanced by a strong Parliament, not to the point where Parliament is taking over the role of the executive, but there is plenty of work for a second chamber to do. I am also clear that its function is principally one of revising, reviewing and questioning. It is not there to deliver or sustain government.

  Q287  Chairman: How can it have a function as a revising chamber if it does not have the capacity to challenge and all its revisions, except those that the Government likes, can be ignored?

  Mr Straw: I am a minister who can give testament to the power of the chamber now. It was one of my Bills, the European Parliamentary Elections Bill, in respect of which the Parliament Act had to be used for the first time for decades. Another of my Bills, the Criminal Justice (Mode of Trial) Bill, hit the ground altogether; it was kaput. There are plenty of examples I can give—with which Members will be very familiar since during many of the debates they were on the other side—where revisions to some of my excellent Home Office Bills were made by their Lordships. The Bills came back. What happens? The power of the Lords at the moment should not be ignored. If you are a busy minister and have three or four Bills on the go—it was ever thus with Home Secretaries—at this time of year you are irritating the business managers like crazy. They are not terribly interested in the merits of clause 102, but they are interested in whether the Government will be embarrassment if people at both ends get really stroppy. One is then under very considerable pressure to concede where one can. That is exactly what has happened. I may say that most of the time I accepted Lords' amendments. I believed on mature reflection that they improved the Bill. That is another reason for enhanced scrutiny.

  Q288  James Brokenshire: I should like to move on to the Joint Committee which has been established to examine the conventions relating to the work of the House of Lords. Obviously, this was established in advance of the decisions to which we shall move in terms of the composition of the House. Would it have been better to do the two together, and why was it believed that it was appropriate to do this part in advance?

  Mr Straw: As you indicated, the detailed decisions were made before I became Leader, but I happen to agree with them. There is a need for greater clarity on the conventions. The Committee is, as you know, looking at whether it is practicable to codify the conventions, which also requires that they be better identified. As to composition, I believe that it is now the responsibility of government to bring forward some proposals. We had the Wakeham Royal Commission, the first Cunningham Committee and two White Papers. To put the issue of composition into commission again would not have been appropriate. What would have emerged from it would be a wide range of views. My job is to see whether it is possible to find a consensus.

  Q289  James Brokenshire: Can one take it that, given the Joint Committee is not using its remit to modify or codify the working practices of the House of Lords, as I understand it, there will not be a further debate about the function of the Lords and it is purely the composition that then follows? You will appreciate that there is an inextricable linkage as to whether we end up with a de facto unicameral system because the second chamber does not have sufficient powers to hold the Commons to account?

  Mr Straw: The purpose of the working party is to codify, not modify, notwithstanding the fact that during the course of a very good but unexpected debate on 10 May David Howarth, the Member for Cambridge, who turned out to be an eminent jurist, gave us a short lecture on the French approach to codifying. He said that French jurists used the adage that to codify was to modify. We are English lawyers and we take a slightly different view.

  Chairman: And he is in another committee.

  Q290  James Brokenshire: To ensure we are clear, we are following English rather than French law practice?

  Mr Straw: Yes. I have also said—I cannot recall whether I said it to the Joint Committee but I certainly said it in other places—that it is no part of the Government's intention to reduce the power of the House of Lords. Indeed, we are only interested in the power of the House of Lords insofar as it affects relatively the power of the House of Commons. Over the past 40 years in my judgment the House of Lords has become more active in scrutinising the work of government, and long may it continue. As long as that does not conflict with the key issues of primacy I do not have a problem; I think it is a good thing.

  Q291  James Brokenshire: Do I take it that, therefore, you are not committed to a suggestion which has been made about the timetabling of Bills in the House of Lords, because that obviously seems to be a modification rather than codification and cuts across that?

  Mr Straw: That was a manifesto commitment and was free standing from the establishment of the Joint Committee. What I said to the Joint Committee was words to the effect that we were not coming forward with proposals to legislate in respect of the 60-day provision pending any recommendations or conclusions of the Joint Committee, and that remains the situation. I understand the objections to the 60-day limit and hope that colleagues here will acknowledge, whether or not they agree with that limit, that we were trying to deal with a genuine mischief, namely what we saw as an abuse of delay to the point where it equalled veto. I do not think that that is part of the function of the Lords.

  Q292  James Brokenshire: Do you accept there is some criticism as to the drafting of legislation and that the House of Lords continues to fulfil a very effective role in improving language and drafting, which takes time? That may suffer if one has timetabling. In the context of the existing conventions, they are framed now as practices rather than on a timetabling basis. Therefore, there can be an inconsistency.

  Mr Straw: We said in the manifesto in effect that we would legislate to provide that most Bills—I believe that that was the qualification—would be subject to a 60-day limit. That admitted there would have to be some exceptions.

  Q293  James Brokenshire: How would that be determined?

  Mr Straw: That is an interesting question. The answer is that we are happy to look at alternatives to legislation. Of course legislation can be improved. Everybody involved in the legislative process, from officials to parliamentary counsel to ministers, accepts that the way legislation is drafted means that when it is presented to Parliament it is almost never in perfect form. The whole purpose of scrutiny by Parliament is, first, to see whether there is agreement in principle to the legislation and, second, to ensure that what is intended in the legislation is carried through in the language. There are plenty of occasions when I have been concerned with Bills in the Home Office, including a number of measures dealing with constitutional matters, and people have challenged me on what a particular clause means. I would look at the clause and my brief and say to myself that that is a very good question and go away and look at it. That is Parliament at work.

  Q294  James Brokenshire: In terms of the wider issue, what is the Government's current policy on the composition of the House of Lords? Does the Government believe that all or part of the Lords should be elected?

  Mr Straw: We do not have a current policy. We have said—we shall stick to it—that there will be a free vote which will apply to all members of the Government.

  Q295  Chairman: Have you worked out a system for that?

  Mr Straw: No, but I am very anxious that there should be proper consultation on it—it may have to be informal consultation—because it would leave a very sour taste if we ended up with the kind of situation that we had before. The arithmetic is quite complicated, but it is very important that we spend a bit of time thinking about it.

  Q296  Chairman: So, d'Hondt comes into it?

  Mr Straw: For aficionados of the European Parliamentary Elections Bill, we could have endless conversations about d'Hondt, Sainte-Laguë and all sorts, but I do not think it does. We have to work out what is the best interactional hierarchy for making those decisions in principle so we do not end up in a position where, as last time, most people wanted reform but every proposal for it was voted down. Therefore, we do not have a policy. I have been tasked with the job of seeing whether there is a consensus and, if so, where it is. I note from the report of the Public Administration Committee that it was rather derisory about the idea of consensus and instead spoke about the requirement to find where the centre of gravity was. For the life of me, I do not quite see the difference. What I intend to do is to bring forward proposals, obviously with the agreement of cabinet colleagues, which set out what I believe to be the best way forward both in terms of composition and phasing. It is then for the House to decide whether or not that is the best way forward or that an alternative is put forward.

  Q297  James Brokenshire: You do not favour one option over another?

  Mr Straw: Personally, I will come down in favour of one option over another. I believe that part of my job is to work out where that best arises, and so I will do so.

  Q298  James Brokenshire: Are you able to reveal that now at the exploratory stage, because clearly it may influence the way the debate goes?

  Mr Straw: It may well be that the Government as well will give an indication of where it believes the centre of gravity and consensus is, but that will not prevent members of the Government from exercising a free vote. But I believe that the discipline of all of us trying to work through what proposal is most likely to command the greatest support is a good one. There is nothing original in what I am about to say. I think that the most likely consensus is to be found in a mixed chamber, part appointed and part elected, and the most feasible way to introduce it is over quite a period, so there is phasing.

  Q299  Keith Vaz: How did you do it last time?

  Mr Straw: I voted for an all-appointed chamber.


 
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