Examination of Witness (Questions 460-479)
RT HON
LORD STEEL
OF AIKWOOD
22 APRIL 2008
Q460 Julie Morgan: What is your view
of the Scottish Executive's claim that the residual functions
of the Scottish Office and, in particular, the responsibility
for elections to the Scottish Parliament, should be devolved to
the Scottish Parliament?
Lord Steel of Aikwood: I believe
that should happen. We were always told there would be a review
of the Scotland Act after about 10 years and I suppose effectively
your Committee is part of that review and so are the Constitutional
Commission and the National Conversation; they are all reviewing
it after 10 years. One of the lessons is that what I would call
internal housekeeping ought to be devolved. If I can give you
a particular example, an issue arose when I was ill with prostate
cancer. We found it was very odd that Parliament had no power
to appoint a temporary deputy presiding officer, so two of them
had to carry the burden of three for a short period of two or
three weeks and they found it really very difficult. It seems
crazy that we would have to go back to Westminster and ask them
to amend the Scotland Act to deal with a matter like that. That
is a fairly trivial example, but yes, the whole raft of internal
organisation of elections should sensibly be devolved.
Q461 Alun Michael: May I ask a supplementary
on your reference to the idea of a Secretary of State for the
United Kingdom with junior ministers to deal with the relations
with the devolved organisations? Do you think that that Secretary
of State should also have responsibility for regions within England
as well in some way?
Lord Steel of Aikwood: That is
the $64,000 question. I have always said it is up to the English
to decide what they want and not for us Scots or Welsh, with respect,
to tell them what they should have. I do not have any views on
that. Until the English decide whether they want to have the equivalent
of an English parliament it is an open question. I am not saying
there should be an English parliament as such but an English entity
within Parliament, an English grand committee or something like
that or regions, which they have shown no appetite for, given
the vote in the north east.
Q462 Alun Michael: It is an interesting
answer because it seems you had an opinion in relation to Wales
and Northern Ireland and perhaps for London.
Lord Steel of Aikwood: No, I do
not equate the London Assembly with these other institutions.
Q463 Alun Michael: A pity. The draft
Constitutional Renewal Bill was published in March and it requires
the Minister for the Civil Service to publish separate codes of
conduct for civil servants who serve the Scottish Executive or
the Welsh Assembly Government. I wonder what your views are about
that requirement and how codes of conduct for those two establishments
might differ from the UK-wide Civil Service code.
Lord Steel of Aikwood: They need
not differ at all, need they? Either we should continue as one
entity or else we should learn from what is already happening.
I see no case for attempting to re-invent the wheel on codes of
conduct.
Q464 Alun Michael: Yes; it was not
my suggestion so I was wondering what your view was and what your
view is perhaps about the future of the unified Civil Service
in the United Kingdom? Are there benefits for Scotland and indeed
Wales or is it an obstacle in any way?
Lord Steel of Aikwood: No, it
is not an obstacle. We have benefited in the cross-fertilisation
of people from different government departments and I have not
heard much clamour for a separate Scottish Civil Service.
Q465 Julie Morgan: How would you
describe the cultural inter-governmental relationships during
the time you were in the Scottish Parliament between the Scottish
and the UK Governments in your experience?
Lord Steel of Aikwood: During
my time it was very good and obviously Donald Dewar had been a
member of the Cabinet before he was First Minister and so got
off to a good start. We always said that the test of devolution
would come when there were political differences between the Government
at Westminster and the Government in Scotland and that, of course,
has now happened. I do not have hands-on experience of it because
I am retired, but I simply observe that there is a good deal of
what I call needless irritation being created, presumably for
political purposes, between the two and it comes from both ends.
That is not particularly helpful.
Q466 Julie Morgan: Did you feel that
the good relationship between Donald Dewar and Westminster was
based on the personal mix and the same-party issue?
Lord Steel of Aikwood: That is
true. After all, he was closely involved in the drafting of the
Scotland Act, the Scotland Bill, and that followed right through
to his occupying the post of First Minister, so it was relatively
easy. Even under his successor, during my time in the chair, there
were no great problems. There is not a real problem now, except
that, for party purposes, there is a good deal of froth and what
I call irritation being created unnecessarily.
Q467 Chairman: There was a Joint
Ministerial Committee which is supposed to facilitate these relationships
but it seemed to fall into disuse and the Westminster Government
have indicated that it should be and perhaps will be re-convened;
now that Paul Murphy has taken on the role of Secretary of State
with this overall responsibility for devolution, that he might
chair this ministerial committee. Did you have any awareness of
its operations in the past?
Lord Steel of Aikwood: No. Sorry
to remind you, but of course I was never part of the executive
machinery; I was responsible for running the Parliament. I was
not involved in that side of it at all.
Q468 Chairman: I asked the question
because it suggests that if this machinery functioned at all,
it was very well out of the gaze of Parliament.
Lord Steel of Aikwood: Absolutely;
yes. I do not recall any reference at any time being made to it
in Parliament, either questions about it or anything else. It
did not happen.
Q469 Chairman: When there are disputes
between the governments, is there any kind of arbitration process
that could be put in place, particularly if they are quite technical
ones such as how you interpret the Barnett formula or the Olympics
or something like that. I am not going into the Barnett formula
at the moment, I might come back to that, but where there are
disputes of that nature is there any kind of arbitration process
you could build in?
Lord Steel of Aikwood: Not really,
you just have to rely on commonsense with ministers on both sides
of the border.
Q470 Chairman: So it comes down to
politics really in the end.
Lord Steel of Aikwood: Yes and
sensible cooperation should not be out of the window simply because
you have different political parties north and south of the border
in charge.
Q471 Chairman: One of the symptoms
of there being different parties involved at the moment is that
there are two review processes, as you mentioned earlier, which
are executive in their origin, the National Conversation and the
Calman Commission. Is this a recipe for disaster, or can these
processes be made useful?
Lord Steel of Aikwood: It is unfortunate
that we have these two separate bodies; it would have been far
better if we had had one organisation. However, there is a long
history to this and I do not want to go back over the creation
of the Constitutional Convention which led to the drafting of
the Scotland Bill, but even then there were arguments about who
was in and who was not in. So the argument has continued basically
over the question of whether the Convention is or is not going
to consider independence. I frankly have no objection to it considering
independence because I think it would be rejected, so I do not
know why it is not possible to look at it together in one forum.
We now have two and we will have to live with that.
Q472 Mr Turner: Could I ask whether
the only devolved institution introduced in England has been the
Greater London Authority? Do you agree with that?
Lord Steel of Aikwood: It is a
tier of local government; it is not quite the same.
Q473 Mr Turner: Why is that?
Lord Steel of Aikwood: It does
not legislate.
Q474 Mr Turner: In your view is there
a problem of legitimacy at present in either England or Scotland
in terms of the English question?
Lord Steel of Aikwood: No, I do
not think so. I go back to the time when, during the latter period
of the Conservative Government, we had a very small minority of
Conservative MPs from Scotland here and we had the Scottish Grand
Committee of all the Scottish Members, of which they were a minority.
Although we had the committee stages of Bills in the Committee,
in the end the House of Commons determined the law for Scotland.
The great majority of members were not affected by the law. Now
that the thing is the other way round and a relatively small minority
of Scottish Members can determine the law of England it is not
nearly such an offensive proposition as what happened before,
yet there were not many objections before and it worked.
Q475 Chairman: You have dealt with
the first problem and then created a second. You have dealt with
the problem of the English making the law of Scotland.
Lord Steel of Aikwood: The problem
is a lesser one now than it was before.
Q476 Chairman: Can you explain that?
Lord Steel of Aikwood: Because
you had the elected representatives of Scotland in a tiny minority
in a chamber which determined the law of Scotland. Here you have
the law of England determined by a chamber in which there is a
minority of Scots. The outrage was stronger before than it is
now. There was not much outrage, people lived with it, and they
did in Northern Ireland as well.
Q477 Mr Turner: So it obviously was
not that that caused the devolution in Scotland. What was it?
Lord Steel of Aikwood: That was
a contributory factor because there came a point finally in the
1997 election when there were no Conservative MPs left in Scotland,
so how could you organise a Scottish Grand Committee with the
government side having nobody on it?
Q478 Mr Turner: In much the same
way as you organise government in Northern Ireland.
Lord Steel of Aikwood: I am not
quite sure how.
Q479 Mr Turner: There are no Conservative
or Labour parties.
Lord Steel of Aikwood: The setup
of the Scottish Grand Committee was every Member from Scotland
met in the Scottish Grand Committee and you had the government
side and the opposition side and with each passing election, the
government side was dwindling until finally in 1997 it did not
exist.
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