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Intro: [00:00:00] You are listening to Parliament Matters, a Hansard Society production, supported by the Joseph Rowntree Charitable Trust. Learn more at hansardsociety.org.uk/pm..

Ruth Fox: Welcome to Parliament Matters, the podcast about the institution at the heart of our democracy, Parliament itself. I'm Ruth Fox.

Mark D'Arcy: And I'm Mark D'Arcy. Coming up this week.

Ruth Fox: The heat is on. The government is now taking difficult decisions on everything from social security to a third runway at Heathrow, which could cause splits in their own ranks.

Mark D'Arcy: The scrutiny gap. Why aren't MPs paying more attention to the mechanisms they've set up to control the social security budget and repeal old EU laws?

Ruth Fox: And the House of Lords provides good news for Paul McCartney, but bad news for posh ticket touts at the Royal Albert Hall.

Mark D'Arcy: But first, Ruth, [00:01:00] let's talk about the very difficult period the Government's currently going through, and the difficulties they're going to have getting some of the big decisions they're trying to take through the House of Commons in due course. I mean, this week, Rachel Reeves was out and about announcing big infrastructure projects all over the country, reservoirs in several different counties and most prominently of all, a third runway at Heathrow Airport.

And this has been something that has been on the agenda of successive governments for decades, has never happened because of the furious resistance to it, particularly in areas either side of the flight path. Now she says it's going to happen and it's going to happen within 10 years, she hopes. So all those fears about long delays, endless judicial reviews, a half century of legal process before spades can hit the ground are being shelved by Rachel Reeves.

She's going to make it happen, or so we're told. And it's just one of the things on which there could be very uncomfortable Commons votes for the government. Not so much on an order to authorize the [00:02:00] construction or anything like that, because it's early days, but I'm sure that there are people in Parliament who would, one way or another, try and force a vote, a backbench debate, an opposition day debate, probably by the Liberal Democrats, I would guess, but who knows who might try and bring an opposition day debate on that one.

But I'm pretty sure that there will be an attempt to register Commons dissent, particularly to the third runway there, maybe to the extra runway at Gatwick Airport as well.

Ruth Fox: Yeah, it's not hard to see how sort of backbenchers with the tools at their disposal, whether it's Westminster Hall debates, adjournment debates, e petitions being got up to generate support and force a debate in the Commons.

Not hard to see how all that happens.

Mark D'Arcy: Yeah, the e petition process is one I hadn't particularly thought of, but I'm sure you're right. Someone somewhere will be launching a petition as we speak.

Ruth Fox: Yeah, and it's not hard to imagine that in the constituencies around these airports that you could get a hundred thousand supporters fairly quickly. But I mean, beyond that, those will all be difficult moments for the government to manage. And one way in which they probably do this is they won't participate in the votes on a lot of occasions. You know, they'll just [00:03:00] not vote in the opposition day debate, so they won't be forced into a situation where splitting their ranks is obvious or there are constituency MPs who really don't want to put their heads above the parapet and support the development are forced to do so through the whipping, they'll try and engineer it so that they don't participate in the votes.

And the precedents are there, I'm afraid from the last Parliament where previous Conservative governments did exactly that as well. But there will be moments of difficulty. But actually, in terms of what's Parliament's role formally in this process, quite limited. I mean, the development at Heathrow, for example, would be something that's more go through the planning system and a sort of quasi judicial process.

They'll have to be, I mean, Rachel Reeves has said they want what's called the development consent order. They want that signed and sealed in this parliament. I don't think that has to even be laid before Parliament. So that'll be separate. But where you can also see challenges coming down the line will be in the forthcoming Planning and Infrastructure Bill, which they said they'll introduce later this spring.

We [00:04:00] don't have an exact date yet, but it's not hard to see where the amendment process might be used there to engineer some difficult situations.

Mark D'Arcy: Create extra hurdles, environmental requirements, whatever, and try and build those into the legislation. So there are all sorts of ways. in which there could be a trip up for the government and this.

And constituency MPs in individual constituencies will find themselves under a great deal of pressure. Even if they're part of this Labour lobby group, that's kind of the opposite of not in my backyard. Yes, in my backyard.

Ruth Fox: Yimbies. Yimbies.

Mark D'Arcy: They, they want big infrastructure. It's one thing to say that in the abstract.

It's another to face a large number of very angry constituents saying, well, we're not going to vote for you because you are in favor of this. And we think it's going to blight our lives. I almost wonder when the government's going to have to start licensing dissent on this. And thinking back to the HS2 bill of blessed memory, when that was going through the former cabinet minister, the late great Dame Cheryl Gillan had HS2 running through her Chesham and Amersham [00:05:00] constituency.

And she was vigorously against it and so effective was her opposition that the Government more or less tunneled under her constituency in the end. I exaggerate for effect, but she got a huge amount of environmental mitigation for her constituents by directly opposing a bill that was a major part of the policy of the then Conservative government. So they could have some effect and they could also drive up the cost of some of these infrastructure projects.

I'm not quite sure what mitigation you can put in for a Heathrow runway directly. I mean, maybe things about the times of flights and things like that, ban on late night flights or some sort of level of restriction on them, maybe. But there will certainly be a very intensive rearguard action from constituency MPs, particularly, as I say, in that South West London to sort of Outer London commuter belt area.

Ruth Fox: Yeah. Well, as you say, are they going to effectively license certain MPs to, if not vote against the proposals, if there are votes on this? But at least not register their votes, you know, abstain and find themselves absent suddenly.

Mark D'Arcy: I [00:06:00] don't think the constituents concerned would be desperately impressed if their local MP just had a convenient dental appointment every time one of these issues came up for a vote in Parliament.

Ruth Fox: In which case are you then giving licence to a certain number of MPs to vote against the government.

Mark D'Arcy: Well their majority is big enough that they can actually afford it.

Ruth Fox: Yeah, 150 odd isn't it?

Mark D'Arcy: Also the heretical thought comes to my mind that frankly, Labour may feel that some of the seats they hold are so improbable seats for Labour to hold, that maybe those MPs are regarded as expendable.

Ruth Fox: Yes, um, you wouldn't want to say that out loud in a Parliamentary Labour Party meeting.

Mark D'Arcy: If you were a government whip, you really wouldn't want to be saying that out loud, as you say.

But, but I'm sure that the thought is in the back of some people's mind, well this guy's not going to hold his seat anyway. So let's, you know, be respectful about his objections but not actually take them on board.

Ruth Fox: Yeah. This has got to happen for our development and growth, this has got to happen for growth.

Mark D'Arcy: Well, that's very much their argument, and of course this is just an hors d'oeuvre to some of the other very difficult votes yet to come. This week the government announced the welfare cap, the global amount that was going to be spent on a [00:07:00] certain section of the social security budget, which was raised considerably.

And next week, the government will be putting down orders to increase various benefits to increase the state pension. There's clearly a huge financial problem here for the Treasury that the cost of the welfare state is running ahead of what they can afford to find.

Ruth Fox: Yeah, so we've all heard the stories in the last week or so of Rachel Reeves wanting the Secretary of State for Work and Pensions, Liz Kendall, to crack down on the social security budget, reduce the size of it.

But this week, as you say, we had the debate on the welfare cap, which indicated that the social security spending on things like universal credits and tax credits and so on is going to increase.

Mark D'Arcy: Now, the debate on this was part of a sort of accountability mechanism introduced by the previous government, which was also worried about the cost, the rising cost of social security benefits, and wanted there to be a sort of formal indicator that this is how much was going to be spent so that MPs could take notice.

Ruth Fox: Yeah, so this was a George [00:08:00] Osborne initiative back in 2014 when he was worried about the ballooning level of social security expenditure, and he wanted some more accountability. So what he created with this idea of a welfare cap to improve, as he described it, spending controls and to impose some parliamentary accountability on the process.

So the way it works is, it's all set out in the Charter for Budget Responsibility and basically the spending on relevant welfare, which is about 50 percent of the entire welfare budget, social security and tax credits, but not pensions, that's separate, that must be within a cap. each year, and that's determined by the Treasury.

And a formal assessment is made in the first budget at the start of a Parliament, and the assessment is made by the Office of Budget Responsibility. So the detail was set out in Rachel Reeves's budget statement back in October. You got the Office of Budget Responsibility assessment of that. And then, basically, if there is going to be a breach of the welfare cap that has been set out for each fiscal year, there has to be a [00:09:00] statement from the Secretary of State, a debate and a vote. So two things happened this week. One, we know that the welfare cap for this financial year is going to be breached by eight and a half billion pounds.

Mark D'Arcy: Which is not small change.

Ruth Fox: Not small change. And then the government has set the welfare cap for the course of this parliament. So this financial year we're talking in total 162. 5 billion. Again, not small change. And that is going to rise over the course of this parliament to 195 billion. What MPs were asked to do this week was approve and accept that the breach is going to happen, is unavoidable, and of course it was all blamed, you know, understandably on the previous government's actions or inaction, but also approve the welfare spending to come over the course of the Parliament. Now, you might say, well, if the pressure from the Treasury is to reduce social security spending, why is it increasing so much over the course of the Parliament?

Mark D'Arcy: Because they're not going to get a grip [00:10:00] on it very rapidly is probably the answer to that. And so you can imagine a great scene, a packed chamber, ministers cornered, facing searching questioning from their back benches, from the opposition, the full majesty of parliamentary scrutiny. Not.

Ruth Fox: Not, no. So I did watch it, and there were about maybe half a dozen MPs on either side at any one time.

Two of those were John McDonnell and Jeremy Corbyn as the independents, one of the PPSs, the Parliamentary Private Secretaries to the Minister. And I think there were about, in the course of a 90 minute debate, about six speeches.

Mark D'Arcy: You could almost hear the air whistling out of this as the occasion slowly deflated.

And this goes back to the question I've often thought to myself, what if they gave robust parliamentary scrutiny and nobody came? This is the problem with having all these marvellous mechanisms. You actually need people to turn up and operate them.

Ruth Fox: Yes. Okay, the problem at the beginning of a parliament is you have, and certainly in recent parliaments, so many new MPs, so they're not familiar with this, [00:11:00] and they've got, you know, 101 other obligations, and, okay, the cap has been breached on social security, it wasn't done by this government, everybody knows the problems of the last government, COVID gets blamed, so wait.

Is it such a big deal? You know, there's not much they can do about it. But I think it was worth being there in the debate to have scrutinized the welfare cap for the course of this parliament and to be asking some quite serious questions about why the cap is increasing over the course of the parliament at the rate it will, and how that relates to the government's policies.

Those questions weren't really asked. A couple of MPs probed a little bit, but they didn't really get into the detail.

Mark D'Arcy: And this is going to be one of the big defining issues for the survival of this government, frankly, is whether it can get a grip on social security costs, whether it can help people effectively off social security and into paid work.

And if it can't do that, how's it going to get its budget under control, find money to do other things? [00:12:00] headroom. And other things have to be cut to make room for it, and bang goes all the wonderful investment that Rachel Reeves wants to have to get the economy moving.

Ruth Fox: Yeah, and to set it in context, that breach this year of 8.6 billion, that's equivalent to about half the police budget in England and Wales. To set it in context at the welfare cap over the whole of the year, if it rises to 195 billion at the end of this parliament, the current Ministry of Defence spending is about 54 billion. You're talking about a really, really significant part of public finances.

Mark D'Arcy: Enormous sums that could make a huge difference to the government's ability to do stuff.

Ruth Fox: Yeah. And as you say, you know, we can create as much architecture for scrutiny with as many opportunities for interventions as you want, as many debates and votes as you want, but in the end, if MPs don't engage with it and don't utilise them, then they fall by the wayside and important [00:13:00] questions, not least about trade offs, go unanswered.

Mark D'Arcy: Meanwhile, we've had a yet another reminder this week of the political toxicity within Labour of the issues of getting the social security budget under control. There was a 10 minute rule bill. You may remember Labour got into considerable internal difficulties over the issue of the WASP women, the women who had been caught unawares by the state pension age equalization.

The ombudsman said they should be compensated. The government saying it won't pay compensation because it's just such a huge amount of money that they can't easily find it. There was a ten minute rule bill, and ten Labour MPs voted for it. I think the government line was to abstain, but there were ten MPs, mostly usual suspect sort of names, people like Zarah Sultana, John Trickett, Melanie Onn, Emma Lewell Buck.

So there were a fair number of fairly obvious names, a few newcomers, Neil Duncan Jordan from Poole, who seems to be emerging as one of the usual suspects of the new intake in terms of occasionally voting [00:14:00] against the whip or at least making noises that the Government doesn't like, so there's a bit going on here and this is just one side issue. There's already been votes on this this issue's been thrashed about already, but 10 Labour MPs are willing to stick their neck out a little bit on the issue, won't have gone unnoticed by the whips, even if there's no particular action.

This is a 10 minute rule bill. It's not going anywhere. The vote has no real effect.

Ruth Fox: And just just to be clear, I think, because there's a lot of misunderstanding of what the vote was actually on in some of the press and social media. This was not a vote on the WASPI women compensation scheme itself. The motion was that the bill be allowed to go forward, be allowed to proceed.

So it joins the queue of private members bills on one of the later Fridays this session. Very low down the list. It'll be lucky to get looked at again.

Mark D'Arcy: It'd be lucky to get two minutes of debate at the flag end of a day. It's certainly not going to become law.

Ruth Fox: But Stephen Flynn and the SNP got to make the point that they wanted to make, and to get some attention back on, on the issue.

Mark D'Arcy: Yeah, make a few Labour MPs a bit uncomfortable. And there will be [00:15:00] coming down the track, doubtless, quite uncomfortable measures from Liz Kendall as she tries to get the budget under control to perhaps impose tougher tests for some of these benefits, perhaps to restrict them in some way. I don't know quite what she might or might not propose.

But you can bet that they're not going to be things that sit easily with a lot of Labour MPs. So it's just a reminder of the political sensitivity of trying to get welfare under control.

Ruth Fox: Yeah. It's going to be a tough spring, I think.

Mark D'Arcy: It's going to be an extremely tough spring, you know, both on the infrastructure side and on the benefits side and on any other savings measures that the government has to come forward with as well.

I mean, enormous pressure this week for them to raise defence spending. Getting to the 2. 5 percent early target that they had is one thing. President Trump now wants 5 percent of GDP spent on defence, and I don't see that happening any time soon.

Ruth Fox: With that, Mark, shall we take a short break? We'll be back in a few minutes to discuss trouble in the House of Lords.

But in the meantime, listeners, if you're enjoying the podcast, please do rate it on Apple or Spotify or [00:16:00] wherever you get. your podcast, it really helps us to promote the podcast, get through to more listeners. We're finding that a lot of not just MPs and peers and parliamentary staff are listening, sort of people in the Westminster bubble, but lots of politics and citizenship teachers, for example, are telling us that they're listening to it and finding it to be a really useful resource.

So we want to get it out to as many people as possible. You can help us do that by rating us on your podcast app. See you in a minute.

Mark D'Arcy: See you soon. And we're back. Ruth, the government's been starting to run into the sand a little bit in the House of Lords. A lot of legislation progressing very slowly, very extended committee stage discussion.

Things like moving bills into grand committee rooms rather than taking them on the floor of the main chamber. Stuff like that. And quite an interesting defeat for the government this week on an amendment on the Data Use and Access Bill. Now this sounds very, very techy. It is! Very, very techy. This is an amendment to try and [00:17:00] protect the intellectual property of people who find that what they're producing, their art, their songs, their writing, whatever it is, being sort of hoovered up by artificial intelligence and processed into artificial intelligence product of some kind or other. So if you've done a piece of artwork that suddenly finds it's being incorporated into a piece of artwork produced by an AI, you get no money for it as the creator.

Because at the moment, the copyright laws that are supposed to stop people just having their work ripped off don't seem to apply properly.

Ruth Fox: No, so as I understand it, if you are running an artificial intelligence company, and you've got your software, you need to feed into this language model, this AI language model, a huge volume of material information data to train it.

And they're hoovering up. Therefore, yeah, it's hoovering up words, they're hoovering up images and so on. And from the perspective of being a creator. So people like Paul McCartney, who were raising concerns about this [00:18:00] earlier in the week, if you're a creator, the balance that the government seems to be going in with its sort of approach to the legislation is that if you're the creator, you will have to essentially.

Raise it with the AI companies to try and get the credit and the money for their use of your product when what the creators want, I think, understandably, is that they shouldn't have to go trying to find out and chase up who's using their material, but that the AI companies should have to request and go through a contractual process to use it.

Now, there was a debate also, not just in the House of Lords, a debate on the creative industries in the House of Commons as well. This, well, this came up quite a bit. The government's saying, we're consulting on this. No decisions have been made, but there is a sort of feeling that the government's position favours Silicon Valley and how long that can hold.

But in the Lords, Baroness Kidron, former film producer, put down an amendment to the bill to protect the creative industries, to protect people who, their copyright. But interestingly, the [00:19:00] government and the opposition front bench took the same view on this issue. And what you got was a revolt of the back benches on both sides of the House in favour of her amendment.

Mark D'Arcy: It's a very interesting one. Baroness Kidron's been active in internet related legislation for quite a while, particularly on things like child protection issues. And now she's shifted her attention to this issue. And the balance seems to be between getting investment from AI companies in Britain, which could be a vast growth sector for the economy, or protecting the interests of creators.

And the creators are a pretty important sector of the economy as well. Yeah, I mean,

Ruth Fox: Soft Power, they're sort of one of our leading outputs on exports, aren't they?

Mark D'Arcy: And people like Sir Paul McCartney are used to just automatically getting royalties. When one of his songs is played on the radio, or when one of his songs is sold via iTunes or Spotify, he would get a little bit of money.

Possibly not as much as he wants, I mean it's [00:20:00] one of the big irritants for a lot of musical creators, is that they don't think that the big internet music streamers pay them nearly enough for their product. And this is simply a salt into the wound.

Ruth Fox: Yeah, well it affects organisations like us as well, I mean it's not just big pop stars but organisations like us that are producing research and reports and so on.

So we are signed up through the publisher's licensing scheme for some of our reports that were published 20, 30 years ago, that people are still buying or still ordering through libraries and so on. And every quarter, every six months, we get royalties as a result of that. It's not much, it won't match the Paul, it won't match the Paul McCartney.

And it's not enough to live on at the Society, but nonetheless, it's sort of a reflection of, that is our creative work in which we've got the copyright.

Mark D'Arcy: And if that is regurgitated without any payback from ChatGBT, or some other AI. regurgitates your work in some form and you get nothing for it, that doesn't seem fair to you.

Ruth Fox: No, absolutely not. And also you kind of want to know how they're going to use it, because we know at [00:21:00] the moment some AI systems are better than others. How are they going to regurgitate it and how accurate is what they are regurgitating? And if what they're regurgitating does link to you in some way and they've not reflected it accurately, then you've got an even bigger concern.

Mark D'Arcy: So it will bounce back at some point, presumably, to the House of Commons. And then MPs will have to decide whether to accept or reject the changes that have been made in the House of Lords. And at that point, the government has a decision to make about whether it whips in favour or against these changes.

Ruth Fox: Yeah. And again, I think that's going to be an interesting test because the government says it's consulting. I think the bill's coming back in mid February.

Mark D'Arcy: Yeah, well, it's definitely a very, very interesting googly on an issue that is probably only half understood by a lot of parliamentarians and commentators like me as well.

So, I'm not going to claim to any level of expertise in this issue, but you can see that this has blown up rather left field. This is probably an issue in which the government was rather hoping not to have to have an opinion.

Ruth Fox: Yes. [00:22:00] Well, there we are. They're going to have to, have to front up to it later this month and we'll see what happens.

Mark D'Arcy: In fact, their Lordships seem to have been rather enjoying themselves this week because not only have they amended this bill, they've taken a very, very unusual step in the House of Lords and they have amended what's called a private bill. Now, a private bill is a bill that deals with the legalities around a specific private interest.

And in this case, the private interest is about the management of the Albert Hall and the charitable trust that is currently running the Albert Hall. Take it away, Ruth.

Ruth Fox: Yes, so peers have done something this week that we think they have not done since the 1990s, which is essentially to amend a private bill against the wishes of the sponsor.

In this case, the trustees of the Royal Albert Hall. So, a bit of background listeners to this, a bit of an explainer. The Royal Albert Hall, built in Victorian times, funded by public subsidy, and as happens then, as now, their ambitions were greater than their financial resources. And they came close to bankruptcy.

[00:23:00] And the then Gladstone government didn't want to bail them out. So their solution was to sell seats in the Royal Albert Hall, this new building, on a 999 year lease. So they went for considerable sums of money. And these seats have passed down the generations. And so about a quarter of the seats in the Royal Albert Hall are allocated to what are called seat holders, the descendants of these original funders.

About 80 percent of the governing body of the Royal Albert Hall are the seat holders. So, the constitution and governance of the Royal Albert Hall is a matter for Parliament because the Royal Albert Hall arrangements as an organisation were set up by Act of Parliament. So hence you have this private bill because the Royal Albert Hall wants to make some changes to its constitution and governance arrangements.

And basically the peers have taken the opportunity to address something that has been running and running for quite some time.

Mark D'Arcy: This is the issue of posh ticket touting.

Ruth Fox: Posh ticket touting.

Mark D'Arcy: Someone called it, I should [00:24:00] say. Not our words.

Ruth Fox: Not our words,

Mark D'Arcy: But a description that was bandied about.

Ruth Fox: Lord Bassam of Brighton raised this in the house.

Essentially what's happening is that if you are a seat holder, you obviously get tickets to certain events at the Royal Albert Hall. Some are more valuable than others. But if you don't want to attend or can't attend, those seat holders can basically sell their tickets on the open market. Now, it didn't used to be an issue.

But in recent years obviously with the advent of online platforms for reselling tickets through things like Ticketmaster, it has become big business. You've, for example, got, quoted in the debates in the House of Lords this week, you've got tickets for the Ed Sheeran concerts going for 5, 000.

Mark D'Arcy: For reasons that pass all understanding.

Ruth Fox: Oh yeah, you're not a fan then.

Mark D'Arcy: No, not so much.

Ruth Fox: Um, but you know, the seat holders are essentially selling their seats on to the highest bidder. Now the problem is a governance one because a good [00:25:00] proportion of the trustees of what is now a charity, the Royal Albert Hall is a charity now, has been for quite some years, they are in effect in a position to get financial benefit from their seating arrangements and from who gets tickets, when and so on.

Now that is a breach of governance, charity law, because trustees of a charity, as you know, as you're a trustee of the History of Parliament Trust, I obviously work under a board of trustees here at the Society because we're a charity, you can't take decisions as a trustee of a charity that will personally benefit you financially.

Mark D'Arcy: Yeah.

Ruth Fox: That's just a no no. It's a basic no no. And the problem is that the rather convoluted governance arrangements of the Royal Albert Hall, the seat holders say, well, we own these seats, they don't belong to the Royal Albert Hall, they're ours, but they're operating within this charitable structure and benefiting financially from decisions that are taken.

So it's a mess. So it's a mess. The Charity Commission has looked at this over the years and has expressed concerns. But basically the Royal Albert Hall's brought this bill to make some [00:26:00] necessary governance arrangements. changes that they want, but they haven't addressed this issue.

Mark D'Arcy: So what do they do now?

Ruth Fox: So Lord Hodgson, who has sort of taken up the cudgels of this, on the basis that this is a breach of charity law, he proposed an amendment this week at third reading to the bill to basically say that the seat holders, if they don't want to use their seat, they have to return it to the Royal Albert Hall box office, and it will be processed in the normal way, resold through that route.

They wouldn't be able to flog it on Ticketmaster for three, five grand, a lot more. And they wouldn't be able to make decisions about which seats for which events they were going to get. So it's basically to bring it more in line with accepted charity governance. There were quite a number of peers, including a one who was a former president of the Royal Albert Hall, who spoke out strongly against this.

But interesting, and it led to a, shall we say, a spat between him and Baroness Hale, former head of the Supreme Court. Listeners will be familiar with her [00:27:00] as

Mark D'Arcy: Famed for the spider badge.

Ruth Fox: Spider badge at the prorogation, unlawful prorogation hearing in the, in the Supreme Court back in 2019. She chaired the select committee that looked at this bill, because it's a private bill, it has to go to a select committee, and people who've got an interest in this can make representations. And ended up with a spat in the chamber between the two of them, in which she was quite outraged at what Lord Moynihan said about how she'd handled this committee and its hearings.

And a government whip had to intervene and basically say, can I remind everybody that we should be comradely and, and sort of manage our language. So it all got a bit messy.

Mark D'Arcy: I do love it when the House of Lords gets, you know, tempers rise in the House of Lords because it's all done much more elegantly than what happens in the Commons.

Ruth Fox: It was all a bit messy, but basically the peers voted for Lord Hodgson's amendment against what the Royal Albert Hall wants.

Mark D'Arcy: So I suppose their option now is that they could always pull the bell.

Ruth Fox: That, I guess, has got to be an option, yeah. They'll have to decide. I don't know what the process then would be, because obviously it's past third reading in [00:28:00] the Lords, but it was just really interesting precedent.

It hasn't happened for so, so many years, but Peers trying to get a handle on the governance of a charity that it hasn't been able to do through normal charity commission arrangements.

Mark D'Arcy: It's always interesting to see a really niche bit of parliamentary procedure where something a bit different starts to happen.

And with that, Ruth, should we take another break?

Ruth Fox: See you in a minute.

Well Mark, we're back and we were talking earlier about scrutiny areas where MPs don't always take the opportunities that are available to them. And one of those is in relation to our old friend retained EU law.

Mark D'Arcy: Ah yes, retained EU law, known in parliamentary jargon as REUL, pronounced to rhyme with gruel, it's the law that Britain took on board during its 40 years plus membership of the European Union and the EEC before that, that successive governments have wanted to get rid of.

And if you remember back [00:29:00] to the Boris Johnson years, Jacob Rees Mogg as business secretary brought in a massive piece of legislation, which was intended to sunset all this stuff. So there'll be a date by which all these rules expired. With the aim of spurring Whitehall into action so that it reviewed them as quickly as possible and good rules were kept and bad rules were either thrown out or amended and the whole thing was tidied up and you had a new body of law that would be seen as better for Britain.

But, uh, at this point enter Ruth Fox with the suggestion that really Parliament needed much more grip on this because what you were in effect doing was giving ministers very sweeping powers to just write the law themselves.

Ruth Fox: Yeah, well there were two problems with the, the bill that the government proposed.

I mean, one was, as you say, the sweeping powers. And the second was that they planned to automatically revoke all of this body of law on a set date, which was end of October 2023, I think, unless they otherwise saved it. So there was this sunset mechanism whereby all this legislation would fall off a cliff.

And people like myself and others thought this is not a particularly sensible way to [00:30:00] proceed. Not least because it wasn't clear that the government knew what all this body of law, retained EU law, REUL, which is now actually legally we have to call assimilated law, that they knew where it all was.

Mark D'Arcy: Well indeed, and one of the interesting things about this process is Ministers kept discovering new bits of retained EU law or assimilated law as it were, down the back of departmental sofa cushions and more and more bits of it kept being exhumed.

And if it had all been magically expired, a lot of companies might have been left in various kinds of legal limbo and all sorts of hilarious consequences would have followed.

Ruth Fox: Yeah. I mean, just sort of one example, if a piece of retained EU law had enabled an organisation to charge for something, to charge for a service, for example, and that legal provision had been automatically revoked at the end of October, 2023.

But people charging for the service hadn't realised it was retained EU law that was the foundation for it. They could have continued charging and they'd have had no lawful basis for doing so. So they could have found themselves with a, you know, a [00:31:00] problem. That's just one example. There were lots of policy areas which would have been affected.

Now Jacob Rees Mogg at the time as Secretary of State had an argument that was not without some merit. If you don't have a deadline, if you don't set a sunset clause here and force the bureaucracy of Whitehall to review up against the deadline and decide what they want to do with this EU legislation, it will just sit there unreformed and nothing will change.

Mark D'Arcy: Yeah, so you needed a cattle prod.

Ruth Fox: Yeah, so a cattle prod to stop the bureaucratic inertia that he was worried about. As I say, not without merit. But I, and others, proposed, I went to several committees, one of the public bill committees for the legislation in the House of Commons, the Secondary Legislation Scrutiny Committee in the House of Lords, and one of the arguments I made was, well, make Parliament your ally in this process.

So rather than the sunset, have reporting mechanisms and deadlines in the bill that require Ministers to come to Parliament to report on progress. And that will enable Ministers to have a tool, you know, the cattle prod for civil servants in departments.

Mark D'Arcy: And so you [00:32:00] imagine the scene as the latest of these reports has just been published, you know, MPs climbing over one another to get at these reports, you know, excited debate, packed chamber, Minister sweating as he justifies the various decisions that have been made.

Not so much.

Ruth Fox: Not so much. So I don't think it's registered on the Commons radar at all. There was one question this week in the House of Lords about the status of REUL, assimilated law as it now is. And so there was some discussion of it. The report was mentioned, worth noting, the latest report published in the last week, says that they have discovered 166 new pieces of this REUL.

Mark D'Arcy: Down those departmental sofa cushions.

Ruth Fox: Down those departmental sofa cushions.

So those of us who were concerned about the cliff edge were, were right, I think, to be concerned. The evidence has borne that out. But the question is, what is the government going to do with this body of law?

So, the reports are supposed to look back at what they've done in the last six months and what they propose to do in the future. And I can't say from the report that we got much of a hint, really, about what their plans are. And [00:33:00] certainly we talked at the beginning about the sweeping powers in the bill.

Before the election, for example, John McTernan, former government advisor in the Tony Blair years, was saying that the Conservative government had put these powers on the statute, but Labour ministers should use them. They're there. Conservatives wanted them, but Labour will inherit them, take them out and use them, and use them to reform the state.

Pretty, I think, clear from the report that we've had this week, that that's not really where the government is. It doesn't seem to have much ambition or clear intention in relation to a lot of this law in terms of how it might change.

Mark D'Arcy: And I suppose the lack of political attention on this report, perhaps it illustrates above all the extent to which Parliament, politics is averting its eyes from Brexit now, almost post traumatically, doesn't want to address these issues very much, so they're just going through more or less unnoticed.

Ruth Fox: Yeah, we might find in the, you know, the next six month report, the report during a year, we might find that these things take on more salience as part of the, sort of, the discussions going on between [00:34:00] us and the EU for this much wanted reset of our relationship and the impact on that on terms of policy and legal matters.

So it may well be that MPs do get engaged with this and want to take it up and want to engage with the scrutiny mechanisms more in the future because there are more controversial issues that are going to have to be tackled and addressed. But at the moment, as you say, pretty low level.

Mark D'Arcy: So watch that space, but don't expect too much action in it.

Uh, meanwhile, we've been talking a lot about the assisted dying bill on this podcast, and we'll have another special dedicated podcast on that subject out at the same time as this one. But there's been another private member's bill that's really very important and very sweeping in its provisions, the Climate and Nature Bill that was debated by MPs on Friday, the normal private members bill sitting, and something slightly unusual happened.

Basically, the sponsor of the bill, the Lib Dem MP, Ros Savage, agreed to adjourn the debate on it, didn't push it to a vote, didn't try to get it through to its next stage of consideration, and the [00:35:00] Government in effect stopped this bill cold. Now the Climate and Nature Bill is an extremely sweeping effort. It was an attempt to nail not just this Government, but future governments for the next few decades to a very stringent set of carbon reduction targets, nature restoration targets, all informed by the deliberations of a special citizens assembly.

Ruth Fox: Your favourite subject.

Mark D'Arcy: Yes, absolutely. I take the view that we have a citizens assembly in this country already. It's called the House of Commons and uh I'm a bit wary of setting up other ones but leaving that aside, this would have been an attempt to in effect dictate large swathes of government policy in the coming decades through the mechanism of a private member's bill.

And so it wasn't entirely surprising to see the government whipping its MPs to block it. And in the end, it wasn't blocked per se. The consideration was simply adjourned. Ros Savage agreed to that in return for a meeting with ministers.

Ruth Fox: Yeah, so I think probably meetings with ministers, you know, invited in for [00:36:00] coffee, the bill probably put in the filing cabinet.

But, I mean, it's an example of, she got the debate, it got some attention, it's galvanised some campaign groups, but in terms of getting something onto the statute book, that is not the kind of bill you choose for a private member's bill. Such a big, sweeping, sweeping, it's too, you know, in terms of policy, just too, too wide, covering too many areas, and not something that the government of any, any political colour was ever going to consider.

Mark D'Arcy: What's maddening about this situation though, is that while this may not have been the best possible mechanism to do anything, the extent to which the kind of emerging environmental crisis on our planet is barely mentioned in general political discourse is downright frightening.

Ruth Fox: I'm not sure I agree with you that it's barely mentioned. I think sometimes the debate isn't quite as honest and forthright as it could be, and, and the debate about the the trade offs. Um, I think everybody sort of talks in sort of quite grand general principles.

Mark D'Arcy: Everyone's in favour of saving the planet right up to the moment you ask them to [00:37:00] turn the heating down.

Ruth Fox: Yes. And I think you are beginning to see that change a bit that, um, there is more sort of discussion about how is this agenda going to clash with growth? How is this agenda going to clash with the policies of China and the United States, for example? You know, what we do to change things is going to be minuscule in comparison in terms of its impact and effect in changing the climate situation compared to what actions they take. So, you know, to what extent are we going to take on policies that make the country, if not poorer, then certainly no, no wealthier. If other countries are just going to press ahead with what they're doing.

Mark D'Arcy: Well, america's going drill, baby drill, and China's building new coal fired power stations.

Ruth Fox: Now this comes through in the debate that they had on the private members bill. But as I say, if you wanted to change something in the environmental field, you really needed to go for a much narrower.

Mark D'Arcy: I think that would probably have been a wiser move if you wanted to get something on the statute book, but certainly this debate and this bill has got people talking to an extent in Westminster whether [00:38:00] that impetus dissipates now that the bill's off the agenda.

I don't know. But meanwhile, Mr Speaker, Sir Lindsay Hoyle has been out in the wild himself. And, um, I think

Ruth Fox: Sort of. We don't, we don't, we don't regard Yorkshire as out in the wild. He might, as a Lancastrian.

Mark D'Arcy: He's a Lancastrian. But, uh, Mr Speaker has turned up taking tea in Emmerdale. I'm so old I actually think of that particular soap opera as Emmerdale Farm, which it hasn't been called since I think about 1989 or something.

But, uh, all the same, it's just an interesting example of celebrity intruding on politics, or politics intruding on celebrity a bit, huh? I think Lindsay Hoyle's the first Speaker to do this. You remember Tony Blair doing a comic relief sketch with Catherine Tate, John Prescott once appeared on Gavin and Stacey.

Neil Kinnock was in a pop video with Tracey Ullman back in the day. I mean, gosh, that's a disturbingly long time ago now.

Ruth Fox: That was one of my best ever media interviews on Woman's Hour with Tracey Ullman.

It doesn't [00:39:00] get better. And she did her impression of of Angela Merkel. It was the best hour I've ever had with the media.

Mark D'Arcy: I must admit, I think it would have been great fun. I've kind of weaned myself off Hollyoaks now, but I think it would have been great fun to have had John Bercow on Hollyoaks.

Ruth Fox: Well, apparently Mr Speaker recorded this sort of, I'm not sure whether it was during or just before the general election, but they couldn't then use it once the election was called because it would have breached election guidelines.

So it was broadcast this week. So he took tea in Yorkshire, which for a man from Chorley is, it's quite, it's quite a step.

Mark D'Arcy: I wonder if he brought his own Chorley cake or fly pie. They're a bit like an Eccles cake, although I'll probably get lynched for saying that if I ever ventured into Chorley again.

Ruth Fox: Not at all like, yes.

Mark D'Arcy: But with that intriguing thought, Ruth, I think we've just about come to the end of the pod.

Ruth Fox: Indeed. So, uh, Mark, we'll see you next week. But listeners, uh, stay tuned for, as we mentioned earlier, we've got another special episode in our assisted dying bill series and we've got an interview, an exclusive interview with Dame Elizabeth Gardner, who [00:40:00] drafted the assisted dying bill.

Mark D'Arcy: So join us for that.

Ruth Fox: See you next week.

Outro: Parliament Matters is produced by the Hansard Society and supported by the Joseph Rowntree Charitable Trust. For more information, visit hansardsociety.org.uk or find us on social media at Hansard Society.