Examination of Witness (Questions 20-39)
RT HON
JACK STRAW
MP
19 JUNE 2007
Q20 David Howarth: I suppose the
only other issue I had in mind was that yes, there needs to be
a deciding mechanism for all of the cases that you have mentioned,
decisions about war, decisions about statutory instruments and
so on, but there is a further question about how easy it is to
change those arrangements so that at the highest level you have
the written constitution and the most important thing about written
constitution is not the fact it is single text, but the fact it
is harder to change that text. That is the highest level of difficulty
and then the next level is the statute itself, a law which would
need to go through the normal process and be subject to those
rules. Below that there are the conventions and the standing orders
and the political matters which in a way you can change if you
can get away with it. What level are you thinking about?
Mr Straw: If you are asking me
whether I am thinking about entrenchment for some of this, of
course you are right; the key characteristic of constitution is
that there is a level of entrenchment above a simple majority.
It may be the qualifying majority, it may be referendum or whatever.
I am not proposing that; others may, but I am not. We have to
look at a range of possibilities, including statute, standing
orders and resolutions as well as conventions. My own sense is
that the clearer we can be about this, between writing it down
in statute, the better it will be for everybody because everybody
will know then what the deal is. If someone currently wants to
stand for a parish council, council, county council, Welsh Assembly,
Scottish Parliament, they know what the deal is and yes, they
will test the powers to the limits and that is fine in a democracy,
but they know where the limits are. On the fundamentals about
the powers—there is already one fundamental which is the
Parliament Act powers—it is better to explicit. There is
then, however, a complicated issue to which I am applying my mind
and if I may invite the Committee to and certainly Mr Tyrie's
group, which is that where there is not a dispute about an amendment
but a dispute about the balance of power between the two chambers,
whether the reformed House of Lords has competence in respect
of an issue, who then arbitrates? We have to have some arrangement
for resolving that; you cannot say there is no arrangement. This
is not a job that the new Supreme Court will want, but in that
case we have to have some kind of internal arrangements for resolving
this.
Q21 Chairman: Is there no such arrangement
now?
Mr Straw: There is not, but it
is made easier by the fact that the Lords is—
Q22 Chairman: Easier by illegitimacy?
Mr Straw: Easier by illegitimacy
and of course there is always the nuclear option of the Parliament
Act. People may judge that is adequate, but I do not think it
is.
Q23 Chairman: Just a question we
left unresolved earlier about composition. Does your 20% give
you room to have a commitment to bishops and to retired Supreme
Court judges, bearing in mind this Committee's recommendation,
which the Government accepted, that if you take retired Supreme
Court judges, it should be all or none so that you are not creating
an incentive to judges.
Mr Straw: Arithmetically you can
include them or not in the 20%. The view of the representatives
of the non-party peers is that certainly the bishops and maybe
the retired senior judiciary should be outwith the 20% not within
it. You can do it either way.
Q24 Chairman: Then it is no longer
an 80% elected House of Lords.
Mr Straw: No, then it is 28% or
something.
Q25 Dr Whitehead: What is the current
thinking of the Government about how an Upper House would be elected
on the basis, shall we assume, that the 80/20 division is the
preferred way forward? An election mode was suggested for the
50/50 appointed House. Do you think that the partially open list
system at European election times could be appropriate for 80/20
or indeed a fully elected House?
Mr Straw: This is one area where
there is not a consensus and the Government has not yet formed
a view on this. In the White Paper that was published earlier
in the year, in February, the proposal from the Government, when
it was from the Government, and the other party set slightly different
views, was for the partially open list system. It is fair to say
that when we had the two-day debate in March, even though people
conceded that this was better than the closed list system, and
it is in my judgment much better than the closed list system,
there were not so many takers for it. We have to work that one
through. It is no secret that I am not in favour of proportional
representation, to go back to the House of Commons or indeed to
local government, but I have always understood the intellectual
argument in favour of proportional representation. I do not foam
at the mouth about it; it is just that you have to make a judgment
about what electoral system is appropriate for a particular institution.
It is for that reason that I favoured a proportionate system,
precisely because it is not delivering a government and you are
much better able to ensure, given these days of the split of voting,
that no one party is in a majority. One of the many objections
I have to proportional representation for the Commons is that
it is a sort of fraud on the electorate because parties cannot
come forward and say if they are elected they will do X because
they know damn well they are never going to be in that position.
What X becomes depends on post-electoral negotiations. That issue
does not arise because the other chamber is not there to deliver
a government. We have to work this through and, let me say, I
am thinking about this; I do not see that many merits in multi-member
STV constituencies, but there is an issue of lists, whether they
are semi-open or open; there is also the question of whether you
go for something like the old European parliamentary constituencies,
which some members of the Conservative party favour, on the first-past-the-post
basis, or you could have it on a number basis. If you are only
electing a third of these members at each time, then it will even
itself out in terms of popular sentiment over the three cycles.
Q26 Chairman: So it is wide open.
Mr Straw: It is fair to say that
it is wide open.
Q27 Dr Whitehead: You would envisage,
for example, a consultation process emerging.
Mr Straw: Yes. We would have to
have a process. It may well be in the end that we have to have
votes on this. I am less exercised about that issue than I am
about how we pin the powers down. That is the most fundamental
issue in my judgment. Now that we have the overall architecture
there is a broad consensus about that, which was reflected in
the debate, which is a wholly or mainly elected chamber as a complement
not a rival and as part of that there was a general consensus
that people should be elected for long periods and probably not
serve again and on a cyclical basis.
Q28 Dr Whitehead: A partly open list
system would, I assume, be partly open on the grounds that one
would not simply have to vote for a descending list. On the other
hand, the list would be organised to some extent, for example,
on the grounds of quotas of who was on the list and presumably
the votes that then went onto the list would have to conform in
some way to how those quotas were organised.
Mr Straw: Do you mean quotas of
men and women, for example?
Q29 Dr Whitehead: For example; yes.
Mr Straw: Increasing representation
of women you can do indirectly through the parties. You can do
it directly by saying half women, half men or you can do it by
a mixture of both. The more discretion you give to the voter,
the less easy it is to have quotas; people just have to understand
that. Unless you are saying that in any one election it is only
men or only women standing, but no-one is suggesting that, there
is a problem and it would really be quite difficult. I had the
Belgian ballot paper with me, if asked, during the two-day debate
because they have a list system; you have the lists for each party
and you can either plump, as you used to in the old Football Pools—
Q30 Chairman: We had this argument
about the European elections. I tried to persuade you that it
was preferable to the one you gave us in the European elections.
Mr Straw: You did indeed. There
was much merit in what you suggested; there still is. You could
plump for the list, in which case, you get people on that list
or you plump for an individual, in which case they get an added
vote but the party also gets the vote as well. The vote for that
individual comes out of order and that is how it works.
Q31 Chairman: Are we clear whether
you formed a view as to whether this matter should be left to
the parties or whether the system should impose quotas and so
on?
Mr Straw: We have not formed a
view. That is an issue we have to discuss and determine. All I
am doing is giving a health warning that there are some electoral
systems where it is much easier to deliver than others and some
systems where it is impossible to deliver it through the system.
For example, with single member constituencies, unless you said
constituency A only women, constituency B only men, which no-one
is going to do, you have to deliver this indirectly within parties.
In any case I think parties ought to be doing this, both in respect
of women and minority candidates.
Q32 Dr Whitehead: Would you also
consider that there should be any restriction, for example on
the age of who might stand, on the ground that a second chamber
might reflect wisdom and gravitas and among other things might
not be a Formula 3 tryout for the Formula 1 of the first chamber
by young aspiring parliamentarians? In the White Paper you did
also suggest what might be described as a cooling-off period,
that should you come to the end of your term, if you are still
standing in the second chamber, then there should be a period
before which you should not be able to stand for the other chamber.
Is that still your view in terms of the change of composition
recommended by the committee?
Mr Straw: In the work in the cross-party
group we were all much influenced by Wakeham in this area. Wakeham
looked at a minimum age; there is a minimum age in the States
for senators which I think is 35, but his commission came down
against a minimum age above the 18 or 21. I am against that as
well, because there may well be somebody who is 25 who thinks
they should have a chance there. Where we all agreed with Wakeham
and more important is that if you are going to make the other
chamber different, then you have to say to folk that it is not
a route into the House of Commons. There are three linked means
of doing that. One is to have people elected for long periods,
typically three electoral cycles, about 12 or 15 years. The second
is to allow people to serve only for one term; that is more controversial.
The third, on which there is a high degree of unanimity, is that
there should be this quarantine period of five years after leaving
at the end of the term. If you got elected and it was a 12-year
term, then even if you resigned it would still be 17 years before
you could be elected to the House of Commons. Those arrangements
will send out a very important signal that this is a different
kind of institution. It is also much more likely to be part-time,
even for the elected members, and why not?
Q33 Jeremy Wright: Can we think forward
in the process a little bit? You have told us already of the likelihood
that these reforms, however they play out, will not take effect
until after the next election because there will simply not be
time to resolve the matter before the election. I understand that.
However, once there has been a resolution—and let us assume
for the sake of argument that it is an 80/20 split—there
is then going to be a lengthy transition period and the proposal
you have set out indicates that it could take certainly up to
the middle of the century for the House of Lords to look as you
would wish it to look because, for understandable reasons, you
do not want to see people thrown out on their ear because of the
changes which are being made. Do you have any concerns about the
way in which the public are likely to view that process of transition?
If they are told we will have a new House of Lords, constructed
in a new way to do a different job, but then they see that happening
only very gradually over a very long period of time, does that
give you concern?
Mr Straw: I do not think so. The
new institution would be more likely to attract public support
and respect if it were done gradually. It is much more likely
to stick as well. If we were to agree this process, it would take
about 20 years before it settled down. It would be open to a future
Parliament to say there was real public sentiment to speed this
process up so that was what they were going to do. My advice is
that people should not make the best of the enemy the good. If
we get an agreed reform, a major change in our constitution, it
will strengthen Parliament. One of the consequences of having
a more active House of Lords or reformed second chamber is that
it puts pressure on the House of Commons to be more active, that
is to say they are not a zero sum, it would make both institutions
more active. If in the course of doing that you are taking people
out who have been appointed to the second chamber and sometimes
have given up careers and things, just removing them, it makes
for very great difficulty in getting the consent to the new institution
established. People have to make a judgment about this, but I
think we have got it more or less right. It may well be, in any
event, that if you allowed certain grandfather rights to existing
life peers, but also allowed them to resign from sitting, leaving
aside if there were 20% appointed in their own right, once you
got to a situation where 70% of the 100% were elected they may
say they feel like a fish out of water here and it would be better
if they were not around.
Q34 Jeremy Wright: So you have not
considered any further incentives to offer those life peers to
leave a bit early, no early retirement packages?
Mr Straw: Because there was no
budget to go with this, the White Paper simply recited what Wakeham
had said about this, which raised the possibility of a retirement
package but no more and then said that there was much to consider
about this. This is paragraph 9.9 onwards where we just recited
Wakeham on this about payment and resourcing of members and also
the possibility of some retirement arrangements.
Q35 Chairman: So you just kept a
reminder.
Mr Straw: We put a marker on it.
In a sense the monetary issues are easy to resolve. They require
money, but they do not pose the same level of intellectual challenge
that is raised by developing new architecture for this institution.
I want to get that done first.
Chairman: Let us turn to the issue of
party funding for which you also have responsibility.
Q36 Dr Whitehead: A direct question
first. Could you let us know what the progress of the all-party
talks on the subject of party funding has been?
Mr Straw: Yes, to this extent.
May I say, as with the cross-party talks on Lords reform but more
necessary with these talks, we have agreed the content of the
discussions is confidential because you all have an interest in
a system of party funding which demands public support, about
which we have asymmetrical concerns and it is important that confidence
should be maintained. Earlier this afternoon we had the third
meeting of the cross-party group chaired by Sir Hayden Phillips
since it was resumed after the local elections. A lot of work
is going on.
Q37 Dr Whitehead: Without, obviously,
going into detail about the detailed content of those meetings,
would it be fair to say that the architecture of those meetings
does relate to what we in our report suggested should be an overall
agreed eventual package of proposals which would, for example,
include limitations on all sources of income and expenditure and
would also be recognised as implementable in stages; one stage
leading to another stage.
Mr Straw: We are much informed
by your Committee's deliberations, indeed we have one member of
your Committee serving on Sir Hayden Phillips's talks. I have
been asked about the progress of the all-party talks and I said
that we have agreed that their content should remain confidential.
It is hardly secret that we had the third meeting earlier today
and we have a programme of further meetings. The headings for
discussion and hopefully agreement are easy to set and they are:
the issue of spending limits; the issue of donation limits; the
issue of the future of the Electoral Commission; and transitional
arrangements. Those are the ones we are looking at. Can I offer
you a view about timescale for transitional arrangements or where
we get to on spending limits or donations? Excuse me, but it would
not be appropriate to go into that detail in this public session.
I apologise, but all of us want them to succeed.
Q38 Chairman: The Committee set out
a number of principles and we want to be confident that the principles
are still at the centre of the discussions; principles such as:
that the public should not be asked to subscribe sums of money
through its taxes to the party system unless there is clear evidence
that by doing so it was achieving a substantial improvement, reducing
the dependence or removing the dependence of parties on substantial
paymasters, removing the perception or reality that these paymasters
might influence parties, whether they are institutions or individuals.
One of the principles the Committee set out was that additional
public money for parties was contingent upon a serious move in
that direction, serious moves to remove those problems or perceptions.
Mr Straw: It would be fair to
say that we are alive to the concerns of the Committee and I may
add to those concerns what I regard, speaking for myself, as the
even more overriding need to end the "arms race" between
the parties, which is a driver of the demand for donations, but
to do so in a way which does not disadvantage any party.
Q39 Chairman: Which is another of
the principles I was going to put to you.
Mr Straw: My hope is that we shall
produce some proposals which are faithful to the principles set
out in your report. If you will allow me to say so, establishing
the principles is the most straightforward thing; ensuring that
they can then be pinned down in a system which is both workable
and acceptable is more difficult and that is what we are dealing
with at the moment.
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