Orders of the Day — Machinery of Government Bill

Part of the debate – in the House of Commons at 12:00 am on 19 November 1964.

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Photo of Mr Jo Grimond Mr Jo Grimond , Orkney and Shetland 12:00, 19 November 1964

I should like to add my congratulations to those which have been offered to the Attorney-General on his appointment. I must say that the speech which he made when introducing the Bill should have made every hon. Member, no matter on which side of the House he sits, look very closely indeed at the Bill. He told us that there was no question of constitutional principle. We know all too well what to expect when Ministers say, "This is a matter of no great moment; you can all sit back and sleep while I explain the Third Schedule". Constitutional principle in this country is a term of infinitely different meanings.

We have no written constitution and our practice of government is determined by a series of decisions each of which may seem comparatively innocuous, but which, together, may entirely change the form of our government. I am not saying by any means that a change in the machinery of government is not needed; indeed, I think it is. Nor am I saying at this stage that it may not be necessary to increase the size of the Government, but I am saying that the House of Commons is entitled to have some reasons.

The House is entitled to be told why this is being done. This is exactly what the learned Attorney-General failed to tell us. He gave no justification for the setting up of the new Ministeries, nor for the increase in the number of Ministers. He certainly gave no justification for the addition of £2,800,000 for administrative expenses on the public purse.

The House has far too few opportunities for discussing the machinery of government. It should take the opportunities which it has. I believe that it is time that we looked over the piecemeal changes which have been going on for some time, and not only under the present Government. The last Government completely recast the Ministry of Defence. By agreement between all parties, we are to have a change in the rewards for Members of Parliament, not only their salaries, but their pensions, which again reflects a profound change in the duties of a Member of Parliament and his position under our Constitution.

We are to have, I understand, not only payment to the Leader of the Opposition, but payment to the Opposition Chief Whip. This may have the result, for instance, that a Motion could be tabled criticising the conduct of the Opposition. We may be able to have a Parliamentary day for questioning the Opposition and examining whether they have earned the salaries which they are now to be paid at public expense. I give these examples only as illustrations of what may appear to be trivial matters, but matters which may have a profound effect on the practice of Parliament.

Historically, the English governmental system is based on an Executive, a Legislature and a Judiciary. It has long been accepted that changes to one part of our Constitution inevitably have repercussions on the other parts and that the whole must be considered together. For instance, the Haldane Committee—paragraph 48—found that any improvement in the organisation of the Departments of State which was so marked as substantially to increase their efficiency should have as its correlative and increase in the power of the Legislature as the check upon the acts and proposals of the Executive. These additional Ministries and additional payments to the Government—good, bad or indifferent—are bound to have an effect upon our whole system of Government.

Since legislation became so complicated the so-called Legislature, that is, the individual Members of Parliament, have largely ceased to initiate legislation, except upon very minor topics. Our main functions, which go right back into history, are criticism of the Executive, the raising of the grievances of our constituents, and the airing of issues so that the public may be informed. So long as those remain our principal activities, it can be argued that we do not need great application to business. Perhaps we do not even need to attend assiduously in this Palace.

But, more and more, a change is coming over the duties of the Member of Parliament. Not only is he expected to criticise. Not only is he expected to air grievances. Not only is he expected to raise debates so that great issues can be discussed. He is supposed to exercise some supervision over a multiplicity of Government activities, many of them managerial, and some of them matters upon which there is no great party dissension, no great ideological difference, but upon which the public expects Members of Parliament to exercise supervision in its name. It is for this sort of purpose that it appears to me justifiable to increase salaries and pensions.

Unless we accept that new role, our rôle will go on diminishing. Unless we find a method of being better informed about how decisions are made in government, we shall go on to an increasing degree groaning under the disillusion and frustration which many Members already feel. The first thing which should be done in the debate is to try to extract from the Government as much information as possible about the new Ministries, about why they are necessary, and about the reason for the increase in the number of Ministers. I do not think that it can be simply brushed aside as a natural sort of Parkinson development which no one questions today. We should have a far more detailed account from the Attorney-General as to why all this is necessary.

Most hon. Members would agree that one of the faults of our present governmental system is that, where a matter involves, say, local authorities and the central Government, or two Departments of the central Government, undue delay often arises before a decision can be reached. Therefore, we should examine these changes to see whether they are likely to contribute to a better system of decision-taking or whether, indeed, they are likely to increase delays. The delay arises because responsibility is blurred and matters can be sent from one Department to another or from one authority to another and back again and both or all authorities or Departments can disclaim responsibility for ultimately reaching a conclusion.

I should have thought that under the previous Government, so far as any tendency could be discerned, it was a tendency to bring Departments or Ministries together—for instance, in the Ministry of Defence—and to form within the Government a series of apexes, presumably in the hopes that it would be easier to take decisions when one reached the top of the appropriate peak.

This move by the present Government seems to be in the opposite direction. There is some proliferation of Ministries. This may be justified for some other reason, but will it assist decision-taking to have the new Ministry of Land and Natural Resources, the new Ministry of Overseas Development, and so forth? This is a matter upon which the House should be informed.

The Prime Minister himself has said that a Cabinet of 23 is too big, but he has just formed one. Is there, again, some special reason why in the circumstances of today, apart from the reasons which have been hinted at—the need to placate various sections of his party—he should go back on his expressed view of last summer?

Most important of all is the need for the House to be informed of changes in the economic field. The new Ministry of Economic Affairs is, in theory, concerned with long-term planning, including the planning of natural resources. We know full well that long-term planning is very often frustrated by short-term decisions. Indeed, we have already had an example of how what we are told the Government would like to do in the long term is quite contrary to what they are, in fact, doing in the short term by imposing the 15 per cent. surcharge.

As to the functions which have now been distributed between the Treasury and the new Department, it seems that the Treasury retains several of the most important functions and the machinery to carry them out—for instance, the machinery dealing with Government expenditure. I think that it retains half the national economic group, which exerts strong pressure on economic policies. It seems logical that, if there is to be a breakdown of functions, NE.1 and, indeed, the Finance Division of the Treasury, should either be within the Ministry of Economic Affairs or be highly accessible to it.

It has been suggested that the reason for this change of direction in the reform of Government is that the Prime Minister himself will dictate more policy, particularly economic policy. This will be a tendency which I would regret. It would be a tendency again which the Prime Minister himself repudiated in some talks he gave on the Third Programme in the spring of this year. If this is to be the tendency, the House should take some interest in it and should try to extract from the Government what their real thinking is about where economic power lies and how the functions are to be divided.

There has been a lack of liaison between the different Departments concerned with development. I believe that the right way to have tackled this would have been to have had a high level coordinating unit in the Government. Is this the function of the Ministry of Land and Natural Resources? I suspect that it is not. What is needed is a high-level unit which looks over the shoulder of the different Ministries—the Board of Trade, the Ministry of Transport, the Ministry of Housing and Local Government, and so on—which are concerned with planning and ensures that they are not planning in ignorance of each other's intentions. But we are left in the dark about whether that is indeed the function of the new Ministry.

I do not intend to discuss the Ministry of Technology, because that has already been debated. Certainly, there should be no complaint about a high priority being given by the Government to overseas development, but the Government have been too prone to think that because they give a high priority to some aspects of our affairs they must, therefore, put them into a separate Ministry. This does not follow. It is difficult to see how we can do much overseas development in the way of investment while we are running a deficit. But in so far as the Ministry is concerned with other types of development—for instance, education—its creation may run somewhat counter to what has been a sound principle of British administration which is that it should be done by subjects and not by bodies of people. There is, to my mind, much to be said for maintaining the strong interest of the Ministry of Education in the education of students who may come from overseas.

There is then the question of the absolute increase of Ministers who are paid and who can sit and vote in the House of Commons. I would be grateful if those more learned in constitutional law than I am could clear up the matter of the Minister of State. We have been told by the right hon. and learned Member for Wirral (Mr. Selwyn Lloyd) that the effect of the Bill before us would be to enable the Government to create an unlimited number of Ministers of State so long as they were not paid. But I return to the point which I made to the learned Attorney-General, that the only definition I can find of a Minister of State is in the 1957 Act at Section 13(1). There, a Minister of State means: a member of Her Majesty's Government in the United Kingdom appointed at a salary … If he has not got a salary can he be a Minister of State? He may be a "so-called" Minister of State, or he may be something else. This provision in the 1957 Act appears to be part of the definition of a Minister of State, and yet there are already many people who are listed in HANSARD, and so on, who are designated as Ministers of State, but who are not paid a salary.

The objection to the appointment of an unlimited number of people in the Government and who, like Parliamentary Private Secretaries, are not paid a salary, is not the eighteenth century objection that they are likely to be venal, but the twentieth century objection that it deprives the House of Commons and the Government side of its talent. There is a job for Government back benchers not only in the House of Commons, but in delegations, and so on. This is a serious matter. I do not in the least disagree with the hon. Member for Paddington, North (Mr. Parkin) that there is probably a need for more personnel in government. I fully see the argument that it is better to have these people in the House of Commons and responsible to the House of Commons than to have them appointed from outside. Nevertheless, this tendency could be carried too far and there is an obligation on any Government to keep down its personnel to a reasonable minimum. I reject the theory that in doing that one in any way derogates from one's responsibility to the House of Commons. It is surely on the quality of the Ministers and the nature of their responsibility that this will depend.

We have not been told why the Government think it is preferable to have almost half of their supporters in or under the influence of the Government as against the previous figure which was accepted in 1957. We are now to pay Assistant Whips and, as I have said, there is a suggestion that we should also pay the Opposition Chief Whip. There is certainly an argument for paying people who have a job to do, but there is a counter-argument for putting some sort of limit on the number of people who are paid to keep their own supporters in order.

The reason why the House of Commons is far too tame and subservient is not that it is in the pay of the Government. It is that it has allowed its procedures to be altered without paying sufficient attention to what is happening. It has never paid sufficient attention to the machinery of government. It has never paid attention to the gradual change in the constitution in all sorts of ways—not only through the alteration in the number of offices but through the growth of the party system. It has never directed its mind sufficiently to what is happening. This afternoon we have had a chance of doing this, and I greatly regret that we have not had a much fuller account of the reason behind the changes proposed in this Pill.