Clause 11 - Supplementary
Regional Assemblies (Preparations) Bill
6:30 pm
Mr Philip Hammond (Runnymede and Weybridge, Conservative)
Of course, that is the case, but the Minister earlier acknowledged that the grant is expected to be a small part of total campaign funds. We are labouring under the difficulty of not having yet seen how the grant will be calculated or how relevant a factor in the whole equation it will be. I shall not press 31the amendment, but these issues must be carefully watched. The Government must consider how they will handle them to ensure that there is no suspicion of partiality in any decision.
I cannot be as relaxed about what the Minister said on amendment No. 64. First, he made all sorts of caveats: he said that the amendment was not necessary provided that the Government acted in an open, transparent and non-partisan way and did not use publicly-funded information to promote one side or the other of the argument. The Minister must forgive me if I am a little cynical about the Government's record on that. I draw the Committee's attention to the proposed preamble in clause 2. I presume that the Government will say that that is helpful, objective information.
That preamble refers to an assembly that is not provided for anywhere in law, so the Government are entirely second-guessing here what Parliament might be predisposed to do. We should bear in mind that this referendum will be held towards the end of this Parliament so it will almost certainly not be the present Government who legislate for regional assemblies, even if they do go ahead. It is proposed that the preamble should say:
''An assembly would be responsible for a range of activities that are currently carried out mainly by central government bodies''.
The Minister will be aware that that statement is highly contentious, not an objective statement of fact. Many people in local government believe that the role of an elected assembly will be to suck up, to a considerable extent, powers from local government. We do not really know about that. The Minister can say no, that will not be the case and I can say yes, it will, but neither of us knows because there is no legislative framework for the creation of regional assemblies. We have only indications of the Government's intentions.
With the greatest respect to the Minister, who is holding up his White Paper, that is not legislation. It has not been scrutinised by the House of Commons nor, perhaps more relevantly at the moment, by the House of Lords. It would be disingenuous for the Minister to suggest that the mere production of a printed document by the Government means that there is an objective and defined framework for the creation of regional assemblies or any other bodies. I suggest to the Minister that it is very unlikely that the assertion that the literature put out by the Government in the run-up to a regional elected assembly referendum is wholly factual will be universally accepted, and not disputed by the parties to the debate. It might happen, but I should be fairly astonished if it did. I am prepared to wager a small amount of money that someone will challenge the objectivity and factual nature of the Government's literature. Amendment No. 64 therefore raises an important issue.
I have recognised the drafting defect in the amendment and there is also a printing error. It would therefore be inappropriate for me to press the amendment as printed to a Division. However, we will want to come back to the issue that it raises and consider it further. For the Government to be able to put out information without limit at a time when the other parties are limited does not suggest a level playing field. It seems reasonable to suggest that the Electoral Commission might put out certain kinds of information and I take it that clause 7 allows that.
I thought that when we created an Electoral Commission we did away with the problem of a Government purporting to put out factual information as a public service when it was actually a participant in a debate. I thought that the commission was created as a body that could act objectively in the public interest, disseminating information about voting and so on. Having created that new quango, the Electoral Commission, we now find that the Government are also expecting to put out information in the name of a Minister, which just gives an extra tier of jeopardy. We shall need to return to that.
I beg to ask leave to withdraw the amendment.
Amendment, by leave, withdrawn.