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Pakistan: UK Citizens
11.29 am
Lord Ahmed asked Her Majesty’s Government:
Whether they have raised with the Government of Pakistan the disappearance of certain United Kingdom citizens in Pakistan.
The Parliamentary Under-Secretary of State, Foreign and Commonwealth Office (Lord Triesman): My Lords, our High Commission in Islamabad has raised a number of cases of reported disappearances of United Kingdom nationals with the Government of Pakistan. We will always seek consular access to British nationals who are detained in Pakistan and will make inquiries with the relevant authorities when we are informed of the disappearance of a British national in Pakistan. We would be very concerned in any case where the law enforcement authorities did not use transparent procedures for arrest.
Lord Ahmed: My Lords, I thank my noble friend for his Answer. Is he aware of the Amnesty International report on the widespread disappearance of Pakistani citizens and British nationals? There were over 200 cases in front of the Supreme Court of Pakistan, and the chief justice of the Supreme Court was suspended soon after. Will Her Majesty’s Government make the strongest representations to the Government of Pakistan about British citizens being held in custody, in relation to human rights, the rule of law and democracy in Pakistan?
Lord Triesman: My Lords, I am of course aware of the Amnesty International report. We have continued to be concerned about and to argue about human rights issues in Pakistan, and we will continue to urge reform on the country. Pakistan would do well to observe the inalienable human rights established by international law and enshrined in the constitution of Pakistan. Nothing will dissuade us in our dealings with the country from urging those issues.
Lord Avebury: My Lords, has the Minister any information about the reappointment of the United Nations working group on disappearances and whether it has taken on board the Amnesty International report, which was published as long ago as December 2006? Is this not a part of a wider breakdown of the rule of law in Pakistan following the suspension of the Chief Justice, Iftikhar Mohammed Chaudhry? What help can the international community give in restoring the rule of law and preventing further violence such as that which has taken place in Karachi?
Lord Triesman: My Lords, the best thing that we can do is to try to ensure that Pakistan has the support of other members of the international community, on the basis of all the bilateral links that we have. The issue is likely to continue to be discussed in the United Nations, the Commonwealth and other fora.
Lord Howell of Guildford: My Lords, does the Minister accept that we fully support the noble Lord, Lord Ahmed, in his concern? There have been a number of extremely ugly and tragic cases. I have just had the privilege of meeting the wife of the abducted individual concerned. Does he accept that, at the same time as telling Pakistan that it must seek to adhere to the rule of law much more than it appears to do, we need to work very closely with Pakistan at the moment? It says that we are a breeding ground for terrorism; we say that it is a breeding ground for terrorism. We need to work very closely with each other at the intelligence level to see that the effects of the madrassah schools are mitigated and the effects of some of our extremist operations here are mitigated. Bearing in mind everything that has been said, we should pursue these cases, but in a spirit of wishing to co-operate with Pakistan in these difficult times.
Lord Triesman: My Lords, I would have chosen the word “co-operate” as well. This is an area in which mutually supportive work is most likely to succeed. It is quite right to place it in the context of saying that our mutual work, particularly on counterterrorism, is of vital interest to both countries. If we were to lose sight of that, I fear that we would place our own people in very much greater danger.
Lord Hylton: My Lords, will the Government take up two specific cases? The first is Mr Abdul Rahim Muslim Dost, who was released from Guantanamo Bay after three years but who has disappeared in Pakistan. The second is Mr Munir Mengal, the director of the independent Baloch language TV station, who was arrested on 4 April in Karachi. Both have disappeared, and both have had habeas corpus proceedings with no result.
Lord Triesman: My Lords, the House will appreciate that I am not aware of every case in the detail that the noble Lord has just described. Our consular policy is to provide all of the services that we can to British citizens. I will not give undertakings to start providing services to people who are not British citizens; nor do I suspect that the House would want me to do so.
Business
11.34 am
Lord Grocott: My Lords, with permission, a Statement on waste strategy will be repeated by my noble friend the Deputy Leader immediately after the first debate.
Clerk of the Parliaments
The Lord President of the Council (Baroness Amos): My Lords, I informed the House on 20 March of Mr Paul Hayter’s intention to retire from the office of Clerk of the Parliaments, with effect from Saturday 3 November. I told the House on that occasion that it had been agreed that a trawl for Mr Hayter’s successor should be held, with applications being invited from the House of Commons and the devolved assemblies, as well as from the House of Lords. There were four applicants, all of whom were interviewed by a board consisting of myself, the other party leaders, the Convenor of the Cross-Bench Peers, the Lord Speaker and Janet Paraskeva, the First Civil Service Commissioner. The unanimous recommendation of the board is that Mr Michael Pownall should succeed Mr Paul Hayter as Clerk of the Parliaments.
Baroness Amos: My Lords, we will have an opportunity to pay tribute to Mr Hayter’s distinguished career in the House nearer to the date of his retirement.
Following Mr Pownall’s appointment as Clerk of the Parliaments, a vacancy now arises for the position of Clerk Assistant. It has been agreed that a separate competition to fill this vacancy, limited to applications from existing House of Lords staff, will be held as soon as possible after the Whitsun Recess. It is expected that the outcome of that second competition will be known by the end of June.
Business of the House: Debates Today
The Lord President of the Council (Baroness Amos): My Lords, I beg to move the Motion standing in my name on the Order Paper.
Moved, That the debate on the Motion in the name of Lord Howe of Aberavon set down for today shall be limited to three hours and that in the name of Lord Inglewood to two hours.—(Baroness Amos.)
On Question, Motion agreed to.
Government: Civil Service and Judiciary
11.37 am
Lord Howe of Aberavon rose to call attention to the conduct of the machinery of government and to the role of an independent Civil Service and judiciary; and to move for Papers.
The noble and learned Lord said: My Lords, I confess that I cannot resist the temptation to begin by quoting an article that appeared last Friday in the Financial Times by one of its most distinguished correspondents, Martin Wolf. He stated:
It has respect for institutions which,
He said that good government is ready to modify institutions where necessary, and he rightly cites the granting of independence to the Bank of England as “a superb example” of that. Alas, that was an exception and certainly not the prevailing rule. On the contrary, Martin Wolf said:
“Look at the mountains of half-baked initiatives, the manic news management, the higgledy-piggledy constitutional reforms, the frantic propensity to legislate, the hostility to legal restraints, the indifference to the past and the preference for courtiers over permanent officials”.
Recycling that all-too-accurate indictment gives me not one ounce of pleasure. On the contrary, it makes me all the more anxious that we learn the lessons that might prevent such behaviour happening in the future: lessons that need to learnt by those who will have the responsibility of leading this country—my right honourable friend David Cameron and certainly the Prime Minister-designate who will soon loom over us.
These lessons are constantly being illustrated in your Lordships’ House, where we witness our hapless ministerial colleagues struggling day after day to defend the indefensible. There are endless examples of failure or mismanagement and of over-complex, ill-thought-out, often high-tech, schemes. For example, on tax credits, 10 years after their introduction by the Chancellor, a PAC report said only a few weeks ago that,
- “the Department has still not developed an adequate response to the unacceptable levels of error and fraud”.
That black mark on the Chancellor’s own territory almost cancels out the brownie point that I gave him a moment ago.
The noble Baroness, Lady Scotland, this week had to acknowledge that the costs of ID cards had risen by some £800 million in the past six months. The noble Baroness, Lady Andrews, had to acknowledge that home information packs were going not just back to the drawing board, but into the bin—where they should be. On the Rural Payments Agency, the noble Lord, Lord Rooker, is hauled over the coals almost once or twice a week—and so on. Other examples are the National Health Service computer programme and Modernisation of Medical Careers, which has ended up with 34,000 doctors left in the wilderness.
In every other field, similar signals of uninterrupted upheaval are constantly given. More and more people are echoing my six-word manifesto: “For God’s sake, leave us alone!”. The volume of legislation—primary and statutory instruments—which in the early 1980s was running at less than 8,000 pages a year and was much too much, in the early years of this decade has been running at 12,000 pages a year, which is much, much, much too much. We owe a debt of gratitude to the absentee noble Lord, Lord Phillips of Sudbury, for the information that he vouchsafed on 23 May 2005, when he told the House that,
- “we legislate at about two-and-a-half times the rate of Germany, three times the rate of Switzerland and five times the rate of Sweden”.—[Official Report, 23/5/05; col. 324.]
To what benefit and what purpose?
It is not just the sheer volume of legislation that is important but the content and quality as well. It is insufficiently considered in advance by independent civil servants and still less, no doubt, by Ministers in Cabinet or elsewhere. Indeed, all too often, the policy, as well as the advice and drafting, has been contracted out. That became clear this week when, for example, the noble Lord, Lord Davies, defended, not for the first time, the performance of the Casino Advisory Panel—a subcontractor of subcontracting—which is now dominating the decisions.
More remarkable perhaps are the matters that should have remained within the control of Parliament. Electoral law and procedure—previously handled by Speaker’s Conferences, the last of which took place in 1978—have been contracted out to the Electoral Commission and the reduced performance of our electoral system has been condemned as being close to that of a banana republic. The chairman of that commission, Mr Sam Younger, had a distinguished record, having run the BBC World Service. The tragedy is that he was not in that immediately qualified to take on the task which he now has the burden of bearing.
All this is only one manifestation of the way in which the formation and implementation of policy and the formulation and enforcement of law have all too often been taken away from professional, independent civil servants, and even from scrutiny and discussion by elected politicians and Ministers. If they have not been taken away, they seem not to give them as much attention as they should.
One other example of curtailing the role of the Civil Service in this way is the frequent devolution of the analysis and preparation of policy to “courtiers”, as Martin Wolf describes them, or “celebrity reviews”, as they were described by the noble Lord, Lord Turnbull, in his Financial Times interview on 20 March. One courtier among our number—I do not think that he is here today; I met him only yesterday so I might be doing him an injustice—is the noble Lord, Lord Carter of Coles. He has been on and off our radar screens for a number of years in a strange diversity of roles. He has in fact prepared no fewer than 11 substantial reports that I have discovered in the past six years for six departments. Mikhail Gorbachev would describe him as truly Stakhanovite in his endeavours. The topics range from legal aid on the one hand to pathology services on the other and from the national sport effort to public diplomacy, not to mention our friend the offender management, prisons and criminal records field, which is dominating us at present.
I have learnt that the noble Lord, Lord Carter, started life as a close school friend of Gordon Brown’s campaign manager, Jack Straw. I make no complaint about that; there is no reason why the network of Brentwood School should not flourish as much as that of Eton, not to mention my own. There is no harm in that and I make no suggestion of impropriety but I do suggest a degree of unwisdom on the part of Ministers, who are constantly entrusting people of this kind, who, however great their ability, have less day-to-day experience than independent, professional civil servants and less ability, expertise and general qualifications to do tasks that they should not really be doing.
The noble Lord, Lord Carter, is by no means alone. When the noble Lord, Lord Turnbull, spoke about celebrity reviews, he identified a number of other names that will occur to colleagues. But he rightly described the tendency of the Chancellor of the Exchequer—as he still is—frequently to make use of such celebrity reviews, describing them as “an unworthy development”, in the sense that it “belittles other Ministers” and illustrates again,
with which they are viewed by the Treasury. Both he and Martin Wolf—and myself, among many others—fear that this manifestly centralising tendency displayed by Her Majesty’s Treasury over the past 10 years certainly does not bode well for the resurrection of Cabinet government when the new tenant moves into No. 10 Downing Street next month.
Nothing more clearly indicates the need for Cabinet government than the 2004 report of the privy counsellors under the chairmanship of the noble Lord, Lord Butler, on the Iraq war intelligence. It clearly highlighted the resources of wisdom, expertise and experience available in the independent Civil Service, not least in the Foreign and Commonwealth Office—and not to mention Cabinet Ministers themselves—which was almost systemically neglected throughout that period. The privy counsellors, in paragraphs 606-11 of their report, express,
so-called “sofa government”. They draw attention to the fact that,
“Excellent quality papers were written by officials, but these were not discussed in Cabinet or in Cabinet Committee”,
and express the view that that process,
- “risks reducing the scope for informed collective political judgement. Such risks are particularly significant in”,
I am tempted at this stage to launch into a long passage about the particular folly—particularly in today’s world—of neglecting the potential value and proper role of a confident, well led and properly resourced Foreign Office. However, it is only two years since I initiated a debate on that subject, so I must leave it to others who are bursting with enthusiasm to speak about it. I hope that they will speak loudly enough for the message to be heard loud and clear by the incoming tenant of No. 10.
Finally, the judiciary’s true, confident and perceived independence is, as newspaper headlines of the past two days make clear, probably of greater importance than almost anything else I have so far mentioned. We have seen it threatened by the attempted abolition, and undoubtedly serious resultant erosion, of the office and standing of their historic constitutional champion, the Lord Chancellor. Now, further dilution of that championship, as a result of the merger of what was once the Lord Chancellor’s Department with prisons and other divisions of the Home Office, threatens that independence in at least three ways. First, within that framework, judges will come under ever greater pressure to tailor their sentences to the availability of prison places. Secondly, there is a real risk that the Lord Chancellor, their purported champion, will himself be repeatedly subject to judicial review by the judges themselves. Finally, and most importantly, the integrity of the courts budget will be under even greater threat than it is today, competing, as it has long had to do, with the hard-pressed Legal Aid Fund and now also competing directly with the prisons and probation budget.
Nowhere will the effect be more seriously perceived than with the new Supreme Court—still the Judicial Committee of this House, with its financing currently insulated and guaranteed by Parliament itself. That was something I learnt as Chancellor of the Exchequer. I endeavoured to impose cash limits upon the expenditure of one or other House, or both. In that I was contradicted by the noble Lord, Lord Barnett, as he now is, on the other side of the fence, saying “Hands off!”. I found it useful to deploy the same argument when I subsequently became Leader of the House of Commons. Once they are finally ensconced on the other side of Parliament Square, all that protection will end, and independent financing will be at risk. I believe that the Supreme Court will be much less secure in the hands of the Executive than ever it has been in the hands of this House.
All this is a consequence of the casual, ill considered, thought-free way in which the outgoing Prime Minister has dealt with these questions. I do not say “has addressed” because I do not believe that he ever addressed them with the consideration they deserved. I believe that they have never received consideration on the scale appropriate for today. The noble and learned Lord, Lord Falconer, who is, as ever, beaming in his friendly fashion, has been obliged to struggle almost single-handed through the mess while the Prime Minister and his fellow conspirator, the right honourable John Reid, are about to quit the scene. They will be leaving behind them the near destruction of the office of Lord Chancellor, which was once the lynchpin of our constitution, and the de facto subjection of the once supreme court of Commonwealth and Empire, which commanded a worldwide reputation, to having its finances controlled by the Executive of the British Government. Until three years ago, this Government were vigorously defending that office and supreme court against critics in the Strasbourg Parliament of the Council of Europe.
On 28 April 2003, that Council’s legal affairs and human rights committee expressed the view that our then existing arrangements owed their existence to:
- “the specific conditions of the United Kingdom constitutional system, which has evolved over centuries”—
- “without the beneficial modernisation introduced by the French Revolution, the effects of which were disseminated in the rest of Europe by Enlightenment thinking and the conquests of Napoleon”.
Where Napoleon failed, the outgoing Prime Minister, Mr Blair, may yet succeed, even if post mortem. That is some legacy.
11.52 am
Lord Lipsey: My Lords, I congratulate the noble and learned Lord, Lord Howe of Aberavon, not only on his fascinating speech but also on the timing of this debate: just as a new Prime Minister is to take office. If we are to believe what we read, Gordon Brown is going to get rid of us lot, but we must continue to give him our best advice until the water closes over our mouths. This debate is a chance to do so.
I went into government 33 years ago as a political adviser at the Department of the Environment. I then served at the Foreign Office and at No. 10 with the noble Lord, Lord McNally. Later, I wrote a book on the Treasury, so I suppose I have been there and got the T-shirt. Perhaps exposure to the Civil Service has rubbed off on me a bit too much because I want to advocate something of a middle way between the old style in which Whitehall worked and the Ã1/4berBlairites who think that they should have reform for breakfast, lunch and tea without regard to traditions or arguments. Having said that, I should say that the failures that I shall identify today applied as much under the Governments in which the noble and learned Lord, Lord Howe of Aberavon, served with such distinction as they do under the current Government.
It was not a golden age when I joined. The Civil Service was conservative, cautious to a fault, entrenched in departmental silos, detached from delivery, quite unconcerned with explaining to the public what it was doing, had an intellectual conviction—that could be called arrogance—that it alone knew what policies were best and treated Ministers as conduits. Reform under Thatcher, Major and Blair has changed all that, and quite right too. However, I am not a supporter of permanent revolution. First, I do not agree with the modern fashion for saying that delivery is all and that the job of civil servants is to put in place as swiftly as possible the policies of their elected masters.
When I joined, civil servants practised hard analysis. They shared a common ethos of the common national good and often said “No, Minister” because they believed that something was wrong. Now it seems to me that Ministers expect to get out of bed in the morning, seize on some notion dreamt up by political advisers, think tanks or newspaper leader writers, immediately adopt it as policy and expect the Civil Service to fall woodenly into line; and, too often, it does. The present generation of civil servants grew up in the Thatcher years, when the question “Is he one of us?” resounded around Whitehall, and giving your opinion fully and frankly could be a barrier to advancement. The concept of the independent civil servant has, alas, been thereby diluted.
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