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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. And coming up this week.

Ruth Fox: As war wages in the Middle East, do MPs have the power to stop Britain joining an attack or an invasion?

Mark D'Arcy: The unbearable lightness of estimates days.

What's wrong with the scrutiny of the spending of public money?

Ruth Fox: And it's ermine endgame. The bill to abolish the hereditary peers is going back to the House of Lords.

Mark D'Arcy: But first, Ruth, it's been a pretty momentous week in all sorts of ways that almost nobody had anticipated. The US attack on Iran, the [00:01:00] chaos that's ensued in the Gulf, with missiles flying into all sorts of Gulf states, and indeed a British sovereign base over in Cyprus, has caused a great deal of excitement, interest, and scrutiny of the UK's rather parlous defenses.

Ruth Fox: Indeed. And, what did you make of the immediate political response, Mark? Because I was struck that very, very quickly, within 24 hours over the weekend, in the absence of any much detail about what the purpose of this was from the American perspective and much detail about the nature of the operation, or indeed what the British position was, very quickly, the political parties immediately divided in their response into these two blocks, left and right. And very quickly.

Mark D'Arcy: Yes, it was, I suppose in one way predictable, in another way quite startling, how quickly it all crystallized.

But it's quite clear that on the broadly defined left of politics, people think this is a very bad idea and Britain should have nothing to do with [00:02:00] it. On the equally broadly defined right of politics that the view is the opposite, that Britain should get behind its traditional ally of the United States. The special relationship means that we go with them on occasions like this and British bases should be used. And so Keir Starmer's rather nuanced position, first of all of not allowing British bases like Diego Garcia or the British sovereign bases in Cyprus to be staging posts for any kind of direct attack on Iran. That was forbidden to America. But then he moved to a position when those bases came under attack in Cyprus of saying, we could use them for defensive operations targeting the missile sites that are firing missiles at our bases. Starmer's position's been a very nuanced one really, but broadly speaking that we are not on board for this.

And this is a man whose politics I suppose are very heavily shaped by events 20 plus years ago in the buildup to the Iraq invasion, the Tony Blair era, and [00:03:00] I think that that's true of him and of an awful lot of other Labour mPs, Lib Dem MPs, Green MPs, SNP MPs, and Plaid Cymru MPs probably as well. So the shadow of Tony Blair looms very heavily over current events, I think.

Ruth Fox: Yeah, and I think also the shadow of what happened in Libya, the intervention in the Cameron era government, where again, intervention where there wasn't a clear objective and an exit strategy in the situation in terms of the domestic politics of Libya, ended up in arguably a worse or equally bad place.

Mark D'Arcy: Certainly a pretty bad place. I dunno if it would be worse than Colonel Gaddafi's government, but it was pretty unattractive. But the question for this podcast, is what is the role of Parliament at moments like this? Clearly you don't wait on a parliamentary debate before deciding whether or not you can defend yourself as British armed forces in the Middle East or Middle East adjacent areas.

But at the same time, if Britain is to [00:04:00] participate in military action against a country, the recent doctrine seems to have been that it has to be debated in Parliament, and that was true, for example, when David Cameron and Nick Clegg went to the House of Commons to seek authorization to take part in an American attack on the Assad regime in Syria after they used chemical weapons against their population in that civil war and they failed to get it. Which I think established a kind of de facto war powers rule for the House of Commons. You can also, I was actually in the House of Commons press gallery watching Tony Blair in 2003 making the argument to a very skeptical House of Commons about British participation in the US invasion of Iraq.

So there, there've been a number of occasions now where Parliament has been directly consulted, and even though maybe Parliament doesn't have a formal veto on the use of the royal prerogative, it's a pretty brave Prime Minister who loses a vote in the House of Commons on something like an invasion of another country and then turns around says, I'm gonna do it anyway.

Ruth Fox: [00:05:00] Yeah, I mean it's probably worth just reflecting on the sort of the constitutional position, Military action is a prerogative power. So it's a power exercised by ministers on behalf of the sovereign, which is a sort of an inheritance from the day when it would've been the crown, the sovereign himself or herself, making these decisions.

Mark D'Arcy: The scene in Henry the Fifth where he is deciding whether to make war on france.

Ruth Fox: Yeah, so it's actually the Prime Minister that authorises the commitment of British forces on behalf of the Crown. But decisions on military action are taken by the Prime Minister in conjunction with the cabinet, with the advice of people like the National Security Council, joint chiefs of staff, the security services. and interestingly, one of the political issues perhaps to pick up here is that the speculation in the media at the moment is that the Prime Minister perhaps was not in lockstep with the key members in his cabinet, the Foreign Secretary, the Chancellor of the Exchequer, the Energy Secretary, all [00:06:00] of whom certainly did not want him to authorise the use of Diego Garcia and RAF Fairford for the US to use, for the military attacks that the Prime Minister apparently, according to press reports, was minded to do. So again, there's a key difference and a really important difference at the heart of politics and the idea that the Prime Minister can't carry his decision in the cabinet. I'm a bit torn really because partly that just shows political weakness. On the other hand, I do want cabinet government to work more effectively than it has in recent years, and that this would suggest that it did.

Mark D'Arcy: This is the reporting of St. Tim of Shipman. Now with the Spectator. For years the person in the Sunday Times who would write up every week what had been going on behind the scenes in Whitehall and in Downing Street and I tend to believe this, he's someone who has a reputation as a pretty accurate reporter of events behind closed doors. And what this suggested, we were saying it [00:07:00] in the wake of the Mandelson affair, when the cabinet didn't push for Keir Starmer to go over the appointment of Peter Mandelson as our ambassador to Washington, it left him in a position where he was, to some degree, at the mercy of his cabinet. And this is a manifestation of that. I think cabinet government we've got now because we have a weakened Prime Minister. And he wasn't able to push this through.

When the missile attack on RAF Akrotiri happened, then I think the position changed and he was able to change it, but his initial policy instincts appear to have been blocked by members of his cabinet, and that's not something that happens to prime ministers very often.

Ruth Fox: Yeah. But to go back to the sort of the constitutional role for Parliament, it has no legally established role in decisions to deploy the armed forces. Really important that that's clear.

Mark D'Arcy: But what you've got is the precedents that have been set first by Tony Blair and then later on by David Cameron.

Ruth Fox: Yeah, so the government's under no legal obligation to consult with Parliament or indeed to keep it informed. [00:08:00] As you say, precedent. And really since World War II, there's been a view that the government keeps the House of Commons informed, and that in the event of significant military action, there'll be a statement and in the past you might have had a motion for an adjournment of the House, which, consensually would bring discussions to a close. But as you say, it's really the post Iraq war approach that has developed this idea that there is a convention which the government then enshrined in the cabinet manual, the sort of statement of at least a civil service and government statement of what they thought the sort of constitutional and procedural and conventional practices were back in 2011, that before troops are committed, the House of Commons should have an opportunity to debate the matter.

And that's really important. There has never been a convention that the House of Commons will always vote, and that I think there's often been a misunderstanding about [00:09:00] what the convention is, that it was a convention for a vote. It was not. It was a convention that the House should debate the matter before troops were committed.

Now this then brings back to the question of, is it troops on the ground or is it troops in the air? And what difference does it make in this modern environment where quite different to be deploying 20,000 boots on the ground over the border of another country far away, but if you are deploying RAF forces in a defensive role in their aircraft flying over the Gulf that could be taken out by a drone, is there a difference? And quite clearly successive governments have thought that there is. They've very much focused on sort of deployments of boots on the ground.

Mark D'Arcy: I think governments are very keen to make sure that there is a perceived difference because that gives them a bit more room for manoeuvre.

But I also think it is now very difficult for governments to push ahead [00:10:00] with something without, first of all, consulting the House of Commons if it's a major deployment of the kind you're talking about, boots on the ground in a foreign country, part of an invasion.

Ruth Fox: And it's this perception of an offensive versus a defensive action.

Mark D'Arcy: But even if there isn't a vote, I think there are ways that a vote can be forced. Or a vote can be, a vote on another matter can almost take on the meaning of a shadow vote on the issue at hand. So you get into a position where if you don't give MPs a direct chance to express their opinion, they will find a way.

You really want to go back into ancient history. I think the first Asquith coalition in the First World War actually fell on a kind of proxy vote of the kind I'm describing. I think it was on something like the disposal of enemy property seized in the Cameroons. So it was a completely obscure issue that suddenly took on significance 'cause people decided to attach that significance to it.

Ruth Fox: Yeah, and I think there's been, the sort of, the convention, such as it is, has evolved. So in the period between the Iraq war and about [00:11:00] 2015, there were consistently votable motions attached to debates on issues. So 2003, obviously Iraq, we've talked about military action against serious chemical weapons in 2013. Two votes on military action against Isil or Daesh as they were known, sort of Islamic State in Iraq and then Syria in 2014 and 2015. But really since 2015 then it's been debates not votes.

And the really significant one I think that's always been, not ignored, but little focus has been on, it was the 2006 deployment of military troops to Afghanistan, to Helmand Province with a huge escalation of numbers of troops going in. But because that was on existing operation, there wasn't a vote. And yet you had massive numbers of boots on the ground and questions about the operation of it, and so on.

It [00:12:00] was the largest, I think, single deployment of military forces since the Korean War. And yet, for some, precisely because it was an existing operation that they didn't have the vote. So these things evolve and a convention is only a convention as long as it is observed by all parties.

At the point at which it's no longer observed, it ceases, in effect to be a convention, because it's not a legal rule, it's not a law, it's just an observable, accepted practice.

Mark D'Arcy: Yeah, and what upholds those conventions is MPs getting very antsy if they're not upheld.

Ruth Fox: Yeah.

Mark D'Arcy: And that can cause, as I said earlier, if you like, indirect problems on later votes and in other ways in the chamber of the House of Commons, if it's not observed. There's a price to be paid for trying to defy the expectations of what the rules are.

Ruth Fox: Yeah, and when select committees have looked at this, the Public Administration Committee did a quite a significant report on it, [00:13:00] this concept of a convention on war powers, in 2019 and said that the convention was, I think it's the words were, seriously unstable, which could be used in a lot of context at the moment.

Mark D'Arcy: And this issue is actually causing a fair amount of trouble in Washington at the moment where an attempt to get a war powers resolution through has been defeated by the Republican majority in Congress, and well

Ruth Fox: In the Senate, but it might go to the House of Representatives as well.

Mark D'Arcy: There's an issue there because this is clearly not a particularly popular war in America either. But there's an issue there about a president basically assuming the power to go and do this kind of thing without the congressional authorization that maybe previous presidents would've sought.

Ruth Fox: But again, this concept of sort of block politics, block voting, almost straight down the line divide between the Republicans and the Democrats. Between left and right. I think Rand Paul voted with the Democrats, a Republican Senator, and Senator [00:14:00] John Fetterman, he voted, from the Democrats, he voted with the Republicans. So you had to swap either way but otherwise straight down the line, left right divide.

Mark D'Arcy: And one of the things that you want if you are in the armed forces of a country engaged in military action is a feeling that there's a national consensus behind you where a war or an invasion or a military action. This isn't a war, it's an armed conflict.

Yeah, and the bullets are still just as real. Do you want a national consensus behind you and where you haven't got one, things can become very uncomfortable very fast.

Ruth Fox: And I think that's one of the things that it'd be interesting to see as events evolve, obviously at an early stage of whatever this mission is from the American and the Israelis in terms of, what the objectives are, what the end state is, what the exit plan is, how long they imagine that this is gonna go on for, it's early days, but in terms of our sort of political understanding and analysis of [00:15:00] what's happening.

I think it'll be interesting to see whether there is a real debate, a vigorous debate, about international law in its application in these circumstances. Because there's clearly a divide between, for example, the Attorney General Richard Hermer on the one hand, and the shadow Attorney General Lord Wolfson on the other, both eminent lawyers putting their, putting the case, but reaching different conclusions about the application of international law.

Mark D'Arcy: It's not even just the application of international law. It's whether in these circumstances it really exists at all.

Ruth Fox: I think, although, to defend Lord Wolfson, he, I think I was hearing listening to him the other day saying, I'm not one of those merchants who doesn't accept the existence of international law. He does. I think what he's concerned about is that its application in the modern age with the kinds of threats you're facing, and interpretations, for example, about imminence of the threat and this idea that you'd have a 51 49 [00:16:00] balance of probabilities, how imminent is the threat is very different if you're talking about putting soldiers coming over a frontier, versus drones or nuclear missiles, you know that you don't really want to wait until it's a 51 49 balance.

Mark D'Arcy: So isn't the kind of war that you would see in Napoleonic Europe where some of these conventions were shaped.

Ruth Fox: And this idea that, in a world of cyber threats and so on, the context of imminence changes and the argument also, I think about United Nations, I was very struck.

You think about 20 years ago when you were sitting in the House of Commons in those debates about Iraq, the United Nations was being quoted endlessly.

Mark D'Arcy: Tony Blair's government strained every sinew to try and get a UN resolution to operate under, partly 'cause it needed the domestic political cover.

And this brings me onto another point. We were talking about the national political consensus or otherwise behind military action. Tony Blair's government strained every sinew [00:17:00] to try and persuade the country. This was the Iraq invasion. British participation in the Iraq invasion was the right thing to do.

They worked incredibly hard to do it. A lot of the media swung in behind them. People like the Sun were there banging the drum, and I think they just about won the benefit of the doubt for a while. And then it all evaporated very quickly when Iraq began to go sour.

Keir Starmer's perception of current events I think is pretty effectively shaped by that experience, watching that from the sidelines. He wasn't of course in Parliament at the time, and so I think were an awful lot of other Labour MPs. They don't want an action replay.

Ruth Fox: No. But there's also a risk of approaching and interpreting and fighting the latest war on the basis of the last one. And that's 20 odd years ago. And things have changed, not least the relationship with America.

Mark D'Arcy: Not least the relationship with America, but also the size of British forces.

Ruth Fox: Yes.

Mark D'Arcy: We talk about British boots on the ground, with the maximum possible British [00:18:00] participation, there wouldn't be that many boots on the ground. There wouldn't be that many fighters there because our armed forces are a shadow of what they were even in the early years of the 21st century.

Ruth Fox: And that's where I think the sort of political difficulty and how things could change in Parliament quite quickly in terms of the debate, if for example, an attack on RAF base Akrotiri, which of course Mark you know very well. Listeners, regular listeners, will know that Mark spent quite a lot of his childhood on RAF base.

Mark D'Arcy: Yeah. And Akrotiri was one of them. I have powerful memories of these little wooden and hard board married quarters buildings that became infested with termites and had to be demolished at regular intervals to remove the termite nests. But I was about eight when we left, so it may be a bit of a stretch to say I know it very well now.

Ruth Fox: But you enjoyed the school days being stopped at lunchtime 'cause it was too hot.

Mark D'Arcy: School days stopped at lunchtime where we all went to the beach. It was wonderful. But on the other hand, no one was firing ballistic missiles at us at the time.

Ruth Fox: Quite, and I think that's [00:19:00] the issue. If we cannot defend that air base, I'm not saying we can't. There have clearly been attacks on it. If one were to get through and remember, the Iranians only need to be successful once.

Mark D'Arcy: Yes,

Ruth Fox: We've gotta, it's a bit like terrorism, we've gotta be successful a hundred percent of the time. If that were to happen, you can imagine the Cypriot government would be pretty up in arms. Gulf allies are clearly concerned if there were an attack were to get through on Turkey, you are talking about invoking Article five, so things could change quite rapidly.

And I do think from Starmer's perspective, from the government's perspective, this sort of argument, it's quite a technical argument, but on the one hand, we are not attacking the Iranian leadership. We are not part of that. We are not the belligerent. That's what the US and Israel have been doing. We are not attacking the rocket launches, the launch pads, if you like, in Iran. Americans and the [00:20:00] Israelis can do that. They can now do it from our bases. We are merely in a defensive posture to protect our allies and the RAF bases against any incoming missiles. But there's an argument if that is to continue, week in week out, if the Iranians can keep that up, there may come a point at which you just say, what's the difference between defensively taking out the missile when it's over our heads and hoping that our defensive operations work versus taking out the launchpad? And having done with it.

Now, clearly from the government's perspective, one is offensive, one is defensive, but there might come a time where actually that's quite a stretched line.

Mark D'Arcy: Becomes a distinction without a difference and lots of productive hair splitting for Lord Hermer and his shadows to engage in. And what is also exposed, and we'll be talking about this later on in the pod, is the state of Britain's defenses and what may need to be done and what may flow from that in [00:21:00] Parliament as well.

Ruth Fox: Should we take a break there, Mark? Because that seems like a good juncture to go and have a little cup of tea while we recover and come back and talk about that. The defense estimates, which we touched on last week, listeners, but we've now had the debate so we know what was said. So we'll reflect on that.

Mark D'Arcy: Join us in a few minutes.

Ruth Fox: See you in a minute.

Mark D'Arcy: And we are back. And Ruth, as we were discussing just at the end of our last segment there, the Commons has been debating defense and the defense spending estimates that have been laid before them and chosen by the Backbench Business Committee for more detailed debate. And it was not, it has to be said, an entirely impressive occasion with a British base under attack, a live war raging in the Persian Gulf, there were about 30 MPs in the chamber of the Commons for a debate on the defense estimates. That's not to take a potshot at any of the MPs who participated because there were a lot of very good, detailed, interesting speeches probing government spending [00:22:00] plans on certain aspects of the defense budget. But I was surprised how empty the chamber was for a debate of such significance. With that timing.

Ruth Fox: Yeah. And there's also estimate debates on the Foreign Affairs Committee and the Business and Trade Committee, but defense was sandwiched between them and they weren't better attended either.

We've talked about this on the podcast before. I mean just engaging MPs interest in this is incredibly difficult. That said, if there had been many more MPs in the chamber, they could have listened to the debate that they'd have struggled to get in and speak. I mean Lincoln Jopp, the Conservative MP, I think was understandably complaining that the House of Commons had risen three hours early on Tuesday. Business had effectively collapsed. But on the estimate day debate, so when there were 30 people who wanted to speak and some of them could have spoken at length because of the amount of time that was devoted to the debate and the constraints on it, on Wednesday he got three minutes.

So barely enough time to say anything.

Mark D'Arcy: Yeah. Thank you Mr. Speaker. Oh, that's almost [00:23:00] time. It was a little bit curtailed, the debate, to put it gently, but what happens, noticeably within it was that almost every speaker wanted a date for the publication of something called the Defense Investment Plan, the DIP.

Ruth Fox: The DIP, yes.

It was a new acronym for me.

Mark D'Arcy: A new acronym. This is the plan for buying new kit for our forces in a scenario where the art of war is clearly changing very, rapidly. Technologies like drones and cyber technology are changing the way that war is fought, and for example, tanks may simply now be obsolete as a weapon of war.

They wanted to know when the decisions, when the thoughts were going to emerge from the government on this and answer came there none. The defense investment plan has been talked about for ages. There isn't a publication date. Luke Pollard, the minister who replied to the debate, was unable to give a publication date. He's a medium sized defense minister, so this may be a bit above his pay grade and the whole plan may still be evolving, but all the same. It was remarkable [00:24:00] that the government wasn't able to give an answer on that, and I think MPs were not particularly satisfied that things are so fluid even now when urgent decisions clearly need to be taken.

Ruth Fox: No, because apparently it was during the autumn, and then it was due early in the new year.

Mark D'Arcy: It's a bit like restoration and renewal, isn't it? Always promised. Never happens.

Ruth Fox: And certainly one of the arguments in the debate was that the OBR has indicated that whether the government was gonna be able to reach its target of 3% spending in five years time. And it relates to this plan. There's reportedly a number of MPs commented on this, there was reportedly a 28 billion pound gap in the funding between what the Ministry of Defense are wanting or say they need and what the Treasury is gonna agree or is willing to agree at this point. And the Prime Minister believed to be, and Downing Street believed to be, negotiating the way through between the parties. There's clearly problems.

Mark D'Arcy: Interesting point here that Keir Starmer isn't able to simply pound the table and say this is how it's gonna be on one side or another, and everything has to be delicately [00:25:00] negotiated through. Again, it points to a cabinet that now has a lot more power over a Prime Minister than as usual.

Ruth Fox: Yeah, I did think the response of the defense minister Luke Pollard to the shadow Defense Minister James Cartlidge, in the final remarks, Cartlidge intervened on Pollard to press the point, Pollard had been speaking for a number of minutes and hadn't addressed this question of the publication date, so Cartlidge intervened and said, when are we gonna get this? And I did think Pollard's response was a bit off. He said I had to sit through the honorable member's drivel so he can sit through mine until he finds out the answer to that one.

Mark D'Arcy: Meow.

Ruth Fox: And didn't really get an answer beyond it's coming. So not very satisfactory.

Mark D'Arcy: There's clearly an awful lot of needle here between Labour and the Conservatives. And Labour's come back to the Conservative attack, remember this came off the back of a Prime Minister's question time in which Kemi Badenoch had been hammering away. Where is the defense investment plan? Labour's come back is that the parlous state of the UK defenses didn't just suddenly spring into being on July the 4th, [00:26:00] 2024. It was in fact the result of 15 odd years of Conservative austerity and cuts to the armed forces reaping the peace dividend beyond perhaps what should have been reaped. And as a result, we now have an alarmingly weak set of armed forces to protect our national security. But on the other hand, it's not like Labour seem to have a crash program to remedy all this. And they're suddenly ramping everything up and desperately trying to beef up the armed forces at pace.

Ruth Fox: And that's what flows through the Estimates debate yesterday.

Mark D'Arcy: And funnelling through from Labour MPs as well as Conservative MPs.

Ruth Fox: And that's the point, if you remember last week, we made, that actually the three Labour select committees who went to the Backbench Business Committee seeking these debates were basically all saying, we're dealing with all these urgent matters, massive amounts of spending, and we cannot get answers.

And this week, the chair of the defense select committee, Tan Dhesi, he has written again the second time to Rachel Reeves as Chancellor, asking her to appear before his committee to answer questions about defense [00:27:00] spending and defense plans. Now, she has said no, and I understand why the chancellor would say no, because once she agrees to appear before one department, they'll all want to. They'll all want her. So I understand it.

But on the other hand, if there is this sort of blockage at the heart of government about something so important and something so big in terms of the public finances linked to national security, you can understand why the committee want them, because it's pretty obvious that getting John Healey before the committee or Luke Pollard isn't really gonna answer the questions because they're bound by collective responsibility and privately we presume that they do want the funding and it's the Treasury that's the block.

Mark D'Arcy: And it's a brave minister who publicly disses the Chancellor when trying to extract money from them. There are two issues here. One is that this is an enormous amount of money that has to be found very quickly, which is always gonna be difficult for the Treasury. The second is the issue of the Treasury's confidence in how it will then be spent.

And there's the awful example of the Ajax armored fighting vehicle, which has been the [00:28:00] subject of endless parliamentary inquiries and endless reports by, for example, the Public Accounts Committee where you have an armored fighting vehicle that, basically the troops who sit inside it go deaf because it's so loud.

And so you have a serious problem there with a procurement issue that has been rumbling on for years, way over budget, way behind the projected timeline for it, coming into service still doesn't actually work to the satisfaction of the military. So the Treasury is thinking, haha, if we pour millions in and it all ends up going to programs like this that just don't work, what's the point of doing that? It's a waste of public money.

And one of the things that really needs to be done if we are going to have a crash rearmament drive, is to have a pretty major reform of defense procurement. I'm old enough to remember when Douglas Carswell, former Conservative and then UKIP MP of blessed memory was running for the chair of the Defense Select Committee on a platform basically of taking on the British military industrial complex and making it much more efficient, shaking it up or buying foreign, I think [00:29:00] was basically what he was working his way around to. And I think the dissatisfaction with the way military procurement in this country works is still a very major issue.

Ruth Fox: Yeah, in the debate somebody mentioned that the comptroller and auditor general at the National Audit Office had qualified his opinion of the MOD accounts last year because it couldn't provide adequate accounting records to support the value of assets under construction. Of about 6 billion. And if you remember last week, I talked about this strange 9 billion pounds identified in the estimates for what was described as depreciation and impairments attributed to a non-routine accounting adjustment. And several MPs tried to get to the bottom of what this is. And I can't say that the explanation really made much sense.

The minister talked about technical accounting updates to ensure the department's asset values are accurately recorded. It wasn't about providing additional spending power. Didn't have impact on cash budgets and so on. [00:30:00] And then he said, it's standard practice to update these valuations. But the whole point about what the MOD had put in the estimates was it was a non-routine accounting adjustment, which would suggest it's not a standard thing. So at the end of it, I wasn't entirely sure that the minister had answered the question at all. So you watch the space, see if the Defense Committee can get any more detail out.

Mark D'Arcy: You do get a distinct feeling really of a rather empty ritual being enacted there. And Tom Tugendhat in our pod last week was saying that he thought that the Estimates day process was pretty unsatisfactory as a way of an elected Parliament keeping its thumb on the national purse strings. Do you keep your thumb on the national purse string? I'm mixing my metaphors horribly, but Ruth, you've been tweeting about a better way.

Ruth Fox: Yeah, I responded to Tom's social media post and said that one way at least that is worth exploring is what they do in New Zealand.

And they've got this new initiative called Scrutiny Week. It's actually two scrutiny weeks. So they have one in the spring, one in the autumn. [00:31:00] And that's around a big financial elements of the parliamentary timetable, one the budget and one the estimates, and they literally set aside an entire week where there's nothing going on in the chamber.

And select committees, or their equivalent, spend time in detail questioning ministers and officials about the detail of the spending. And ministers know this is coming up. They know that they have to prepare for it. Obviously the members on the committees get a lot of briefing material. A lot of support is done in advance by the staff to prep them, help them prepare for the questioning of ministers. And now it's early days, they've only done it a few times, but my sense is that the reaction has been positive. And interestingly, one of the things that has been said by a number of New Zealand MPs is that they don't get so often precisely because ministers know this is coming, know they've got to come, there's no excuses, it's in the diaries, planned long in advance, [00:32:00] they're expected to be there and to turn up, they don't get the kind of response or I don't have that information available. I'll come back to you later, and often don't. So there does seem to be a more detailed and a more constructive conversation that goes on over there at the moment, and I just think it's worth looking at doing something different because this model isn't particularly helpful to anybody.

Mark D'Arcy: But I suppose the bottom line here is I assume that all governments are much more comfortable with scrutiny being an empty ritual than with scrutiny being actual scrutiny. So lovely though it would be, but MPs wouldn't be able to do anything independent of the government given the way Parliament's set up.

So this remains a kind of fantasy parliamentary reform, if and until you get some kind of hung party situation where a critical mass in the Commons thinks it's a good idea to do that.

Ruth Fox: Yeah. Or you get a minister or ministers who are, ideally a Prime Minister, who recognizes that scrutiny can actually be beneficial because it helps ministers and officials raise their [00:33:00] game. And boy do they need to raise their game.

Mark D'Arcy: Yeah. And from that Ruth onto another aspect of the government spending and parliamentary scrutiny of it. The spring statement. Rachel Reeves almost unnoticed with the tumultuous events across the world at the moment gave her regular spring update on the state of the national finances and almost nobody noticed.

Ruth Fox: That was by design. I think they, I don't think she wanted particularly much attention on it. That there was no leaking like there was for the budget. They said that there'd be no tax and spending plans coming out of it. It was literally a report on the Office for Budget Responsibility's report on the state of the economy. But of course, while she was speaking at the dispatch box, all of this was happening in the Middle East in the background, and hung over the statement a bit like a pall. Actually, how relevant is any of this gonna look in about six weeks time if military action is still ongoing?

Mark D'Arcy: I'm [00:34:00] almost surprised that given the attack happened on the weekend, and this is on the Tuesday, I'm actually surprised she even bothered to bring the forecast before Parliament. I suppose you have to do it. But the brutal fact is that the impact of what's going on in the Gulf, on oil prices and Donald Trump shutting off trade with people who are too critical of what he's doing and the general economic shock waves that are going around the globe because of this are such that all forecasts are now meaningless. I was finding myself thinking of Pitt the Younger after Napoleon won the Battle of Austerlitz, saying to his aides, roll up that map of Europe, we shouldn't be needing it this 10 years. To almost imagine Rachel Reeves in her office in the Treasury, that sort of doctor evil style sanctum that Gordon Brown designed, turning to her aide and saying, just shred those economic projections, they're worthless now, because brutal fact, they are. It's a silly way to do business anyway, to use inherently inaccurate economic forecast because they're never [00:35:00] absolutely on the Mark. They've inherently got a big margin of error.

Ruth Fox: But by definition the word forecast implies, yeah, they're a forecast. They're a forecast. Things will change. I don't think you'd inherently say they're inaccurate.

Mark D'Arcy: Yeah. And perhaps inaccurate is the wrong shade of meaning. A terminological inexactitude, but treating them as the solid target that you have to have a forecast that says you're going to meet this, when you know perfectly well the forecast will never be right.

Ruth Fox: We said last time over the budget and then the comprehensive spending review, one of the problems with the forecast over the course of this Parliament, of course, is that they imply, the government spending plans imply, that there will be significant cuts to public expenditure in the final two parliamentary years of this Parliament.

And no one believes it. What surprised me was that she was quite so upbeat and bullish in her statement and in her sort of command of the Chamber, given the international situation. She basically said the plan's working, inflation's coming down, growth's going up, we've increased our fiscal headroom, our plan is the right one to meet the challenges that we're gonna face, we're well placed to [00:36:00] weather difficulties ahead, and there wasn't much adjustment of her speech and statement to the international circumstances. Now, of course, it's too early to say, and obviously the OBR numbers were prepared and published well in advance of last weekend in the military action kicking off so it's early days. She interestingly has got us another Mais lecture coming up in a couple of weeks time in which she said she set out the major choices that will determine the course of our economy into the future. Global relationships, breaking down trade barriers, deepening alliances. See what that looks like. Further backing innovation and harnessing the power of AI. And going further in transforming our economic geography so we can build growth on a broad and stable basis. So you never know, we might get a little bit more depth and color to what's the state of the economy or what's the trajectory in the future in light of what's happening in the Middle East in a couple of weeks time when things look a little bit clearer.

But she was pretty bullish.

Mark D'Arcy: She was surprisingly bullish. And as parliamentary occasions [00:37:00] go, that was one of Rachel Reeve's better outings I think. All that worries me about this is that the world is just so unpredictable at the moment that every time you think you've got everything sorted down to the last paperclip, Donald Trump wakes up in the morning and decides to overthrow some trade arrangement or start a war somewhere, and the world's in chaos again.

So the best laid plans of mice men and Chancellors of the Exchequer and international finance ministers just go straight into the shredder.

Ruth Fox: Yeah, quite a number of people who've been in and around the White House and know about how this administration works refer to it as a court, not a sort of normal political administration.

And I think this is just life now. We're gonna have to get used to it.

Mark D'Arcy: Absolutely. I think Wolf Hall is a far better guide to the politics of Donald Trump's administration than the West Wing. Shall we put it that way?

Ruth Fox: Yes, I think so.

Mark D'Arcy: Off with their heads.

Ruth Fox: With that Mark, shall we take a quick break, and we'll come back and talk about another aspect of public finances, and that is MPs pay and importantly MPs staff pay, as [00:38:00] well as the next stage of the hereditary peers bill.

Mark D'Arcy: Yeah, absolutely. Will they finally be on the tumbrels?

Ruth Fox: But before we go listeners, if you've got a minute, just while we take a break, click subscribe in your podcast app to make sure you get the next episodes. We've got an episode coming up on the assisted dying bill with Lord Mark Harper, who's been one of the chief opponents of the bill.

So click subscribe in your app to make sure you don't miss it. And one thing to note if you like watching on YouTube, we've also got a YouTube channel where all our podcasts are posted as well, so you can watch it there or listen to it there alternatively if you prefer. So click there to subscribe to our channel and we'll be back in a few minutes.

Mark D'Arcy: See you shortly.

And we are back. And Ruth, we are onto the next stage now of the bill to finally remove the last remaining hereditary peers from the House of Lords. The bill's going back before their Lordships next week, and I suppose that could herald its final arrival in front of the sovereign to be signed into law in the not too distant future.

Ruth Fox: Yeah, this has been an interesting [00:39:00] one, Mark, because it's been stalled since about, I think September, October of last year. We'd not heard anything further what was gonna happen. Of course, the plan is to eject to the hereditary peers assuming this bill gets royal assent by the end of the session.

So on the assumption that's gonna be mid-May, there isn't long to go. So yeah, the bill is back on 10th of March. But interestingly alongside it, the government has published another bill, which is called the Ministerial Salaries (Amendment) Bill, to make provision about the maximum number of salaries that may be paid under the Ministerial and other Salaries Act 1975 in respect of certain ministerial offices. Now, question was, why?

Mark D'Arcy: One suggestion is that this is because an awful lot of ministers who serve in the House of Lords don't get paid anything. There's a contingent of unpaid ministers there, the whole idea of that piece of legislation, you mentioned the Ministerial [00:40:00] Salaries Act, was to put an upper limit on the payroll vote.

The number of people in Parliament, both in the Commons and the Lords who had to tow the government line or resign their ministerial offices. And the payroll vote's been imperceptibly expanding, and one way round it is to have ministers who are bound by collective responsibility but aren't actually paid and spookily enough a fair number of those have turned out to be in the House of Lords.

Ruth Fox: Yeah. I think this is not unrelated to the hereditary peers bill, because if you look at the amendments in that bill, one of them from the Conservative peer, Lord True, who's the shadow leader of the House.

Mark D'Arcy: But the Leader of the House, of course, under the previous government as well.

Ruth Fox: Yeah. He's got an amendment down to make unpaid ministers ineligible to sit in the House of Lords, thereby requiring the government to ensure all Lords ministers are paid. Now, I think there's something like 12 or 13 Lords ministers that are not currently paid. So apparently the plan is to increase the number of ministers effectively on the payroll [00:41:00] vote that can be paid to, I think 120 from 109, so that would in effect cover the cost of 11 ministers. So I think if I'm right, if it's 12, I think one poor minister's gonna lose out. But this is hot off the press, we need to check those numbers.

Mark D'Arcy: But you can usually find one who's rich enough in the House of Lords.

Ruth Fox: But I do wonder if the sequencing of this is not unrelated. That you're, the government is saying, we're gonna increase, it's right to increase the number of ministerial salaries to reflect the size of modern government. Yes, okay, but it just so happens that there is a related amendment, I think it was one of four outstanding amendments in the hereditary peers bill that's got to be resolved. And that relates to Lord's salaries.

Mark D'Arcy: Interesting collector's item here. Rare example of joined up government.

Ruth Fox: We'll see what happens.

Mark D'Arcy: And on the subject of the cost of politics and the pay for people in politics, as he does one of the clumsiest segues in history here.

There's also going to be a big decision coming up for MPs. It's not even a decision [00:42:00] really. MPs are going to get paid more than a hundred thousand pounds now, the MP salary increase is now out there.

Ruth Fox: If you remember, Mark, just around Christmas, new year time, we talked to Richard Lloyd, the chairman of IPSA, the Independent Parliamentary Standards Authority, and it's they who are responsible for setting MPs pay.

It's not quite getting to a hundred thousand just yet, a bit previous. For the next financial year, it's gonna rise to 98,599 pounds. But if you remember in the conversation we had with Richard, one of the big issues that he was concerned about was benchmarking MP salaries with other similar, insofar as you can have similar professions and levels of roles and jobs and so on in, for example, the civil service or the NHS or local government and so on, but also comparing them with international comparators of other parliamentarians in other sort of western Parliaments. And the conclusion of that study was that [00:43:00] Westminster MPs have been falling behind in terms of their salary and what they've agreed is that therefore this year there should be a 5% increase, which is comprised of three and a half percent to deal with this annual cost of living increase that many people obviously are getting this year, but also then an additional one and a half percent, which they're describing as a benchmarking adjustment.

So that's to address the fact that, in a sense it's IPSA failure to get the benchmarking right. In the past, MPs salaries have fallen back below what they perhaps ought to have been. The plan then is. That it will hit a hundred thousand by the end of this Parliament,

Mark D'Arcy: And that would be quite interesting from a number of points of view.

I'm sure there will be the usual chorus of people out there who think that MPs pay shouldn't go up any faster than everybody else's pay. But at the same time, you also get MPs hitting one of the big anomalies in the tax system, which is when your pay goes past a hundred thousand pounds, you lose your tax free allowance and it amounts to a negative blow on your income. You're suddenly actually worse off for [00:44:00] getting more money.

Ruth Fox: Yeah. It's one of those anomalies, isn't it, that will suddenly hit home and lots of people may find that those MPs are paying more attention to it.

Mark D'Arcy: Because a critical mass of people in the Commons will suddenly decide this really ought to be dealt with.

Spookily enough. So that's where we are with MPs pay. But the one thing to note on this is MPs do not get a vote on this.

Ruth Fox: No.

Mark D'Arcy: They can't say, no, we don't want it to IPSA, they just have to, oh damn, blast, what a pity. Accept the money when it's handed over to them. They can't reject it. However much public pressure there is. All they can do is make a charitable donation from their salary or something like that.

Ruth Fox: Which some of them do. But, so yes, this was the whole purpose after the MPs expenses scandal of taking decisions about MPs pay away from MPs. So this is one of the consequences.

However, in relation to MPs staff pay, there's a degree more unhappiness, shall we say, from the staff. They have got a three and a half percent increase. [00:45:00] Budgets, I think, are going up by 5%. So MPs could make a 5% pay award, but this is all optional, because IPSA does not determine, cannot compel MPs to pay, that additional money over to the staff. So in effect, they're dependent on the MP as their employer being willing to implement this uplift.

And MPs' staff are, and particularly their union representatives are, particularly concerned that quite a number of them may not, in part because there's so much pressure on MPs offices that using the money for other things or using it to change the staffing profile and to employ more part-time staff or something might be a way that they choose to use it.

So I'm sure many of the MPs will make the change and will increase it, but the concern is those who may not and I think it's fair to say the trade unions are not very happy at all.

Mark D'Arcy: I wonder if we're heading for a strike.

Ruth Fox: I'm not sure I'd go that far, but, certainly the GMB [00:46:00] MPs and Peers staff branch have talked about the fact that staff have had an equivalent as they see it of a pay cut since 2018-19 of about 14.5%, they say, based on, the retail price index. They say workloads have increased significantly. And I think one of the things that's particularly riled the staff and their representatives is that IPSA gave as one of its reasons the need to increase MPs. salaries the fact that they are dealing with an awful lot more casework in this Parliament.

Mark D'Arcy: But who's on the front line of that?

Ruth Fox: Exactly. And that an awful lot of pressures that go around that. And actually the front line is the staff who have to answer the telephone to the abusive member of the public, or who have to sift the social media feed of all this filth on Twitter and so on.

Or having to deal with really difficult, complex immigration or housing or welfare constituency cases. So the sort of feeling that their [00:47:00] salaries already don't reflect their responsibilities, that their pay has fallen behind.

Back in January, the union launched a campaign called One Parliament, One Employer. So they're basically wanting to shift to a single accountable employer for MP staff to, as they describe it, deliver fairness, consistency, and proper protections. And they want fair pay progression, mandatory pay gap reporting, consistent HR support.

Mark D'Arcy: And they don't want those decisions left to the honorable member who presides over them.

Ruth Fox: Yeah. That's kind of the nub of the problem. Because it certainly, historically, a lot of MPs have wanted to ensure that they've got control over who they employed and what the terms and conditions were.

Mark D'Arcy: We talked a while ago about surveys that had been done of MPs' staff. And one of the things that was noted at the time was the very considerable churn. Not just caused by

Ruth Fox: 4%, I think, wasn't it?

Mark D'Arcy: Yeah. But not just caused by the fact there's been considerable churn of MPs themselves. But a lot of people work there for a while and then go and it happens pretty quickly. And one of the reasons presumably is what you've just been outlining. That the pay [00:48:00] doesn't match the very considerable responsibilities and heavy workload and long hours involved in working in an MP's office.

Ruth Fox: Yeah, exactly. And of course one of the other issues around MPs offices is, we have another spying scandal at the heart of Westminster.

Not much we can say about it at this stage. A delicate subject.

Mark D'Arcy: As with Lord Mandelson and the former Prince Andrew, the proceedings are active at the moment, so we can't do a running commentary on this, but it is worth noting.

Two things struck me. First of all, it's not particularly surprising that foreign intelligence agencies do look into Parliament and try and find people who will tell them what's going on in Parliament. That's been going on for a long time now, and people are routinely warned about that when they start work as parliamentary staff or when they take office as Members of Parliament.

But secondly, I was very struck, this was on several front pages this morning, I think it compares rather favorably to the level of coverage given when Nathan Gill of the Reform party, their former deputy leader in Wales, was [00:49:00] actually sent to prison, having been discovered to be a paid Russian agent of influence or whatever the phrase is.

It seems to me now it's the Labour Party, people are zooming in on it.

Ruth Fox: Just for context, of course, one of the people arrested is the partner of sitting Labour MP.

And another is the partner of a former Labour MP. Another apparently has worked in public affairs, but also as an advisor to the Welsh government.

Again, these are all centered around Wales, as well. So the comparison is interesting. I do think the Nathan Gill case didn't get as much national coverage as it deserved.

Mark D'Arcy: Was spookily undercovered, I felt.

Ruth Fox: Yeah. Quite.

Mark D'Arcy: And talking about subjects that have come up in the pod fairly recently, we've also been talking, if you remember, to the head of the Electoral Commission not that long ago.

The elections bill is now going before Parliament and we've had signaled an important change that is going to be made to it by the government as it goes through.

Ruth Fox: Yeah. the elections bill, now known [00:50:00] as the Representation of the People Bill, had its Second Reading in the House this week, and the government minister, the Secretary of State, Steve Reed, indicated that the government is going to repeal the previous legislation under the Conservative government which meant that the Electoral Commission's strategy statement was set out by the Government. And if you remember, when we talked to the chair of the Electoral Commission, John Pullinger, he was very concerned, as have been a lot of campaigners in this area, about what that said about the independence of the Electoral Commission.

And he was very clear when he spoke to us that hitherto it has not had any influence on what the Commission has chosen to do, but symbolically, it is bad for the government to be determining that kind of strategic detail about what the regulator should do, what it should focus on.

So the government's clearly had a change of heart. I'm not sure that any of us had realized that was coming. I presume that they're gonna have to make a change in the drafting of the bill to enable that to happen. [00:51:00] So that's what we learned from the dispatch box. And that bill will now go into committee for clause by clause scrutiny and I think that's gonna carry over into the next session.

Mark D'Arcy: Yeah, indeed. Important piece of legislation. And apart from anything else, I'm still looking out for what I think will be a slightly inevitable debate when someone tries to use this as a vehicle to change the electoral system and get a proportional representation system going for parliamentary elections. I think the arguments around that, given the current levels of polling for all the different political parties, might get rather interesting.

Ruth Fox: Yeah. And of course, it's very clear that the government is also going to bring forward some late amendments to reflect any recommendations from what's known as the Rycroft inquiry into foreign influence over our election system that hasn't yet reported.

I think it's supposed to do so over the course of the summer, and of course, that was one of the reasons the Conservative Party objected to the second reading of the bill this week, because it said, given that we haven't got that review's recommendations, why don't we wait? Bring the bill forward in its [00:52:00] revised form, a new draft reflecting those recommendations. And we can look at them in the next session. Why do we have to rush through proceedings now? Which is a good argument if you're good talking about good legislative practice, but I'm afraid the Conservatives are bang to rights because they did this so frequently in the past, and yet again we go around and round in these arguments about what good legislative approaches look like.

Mark D'Arcy: Yes, Oppositions are always in favour of good legislative practice and governments always find good reasons to ride rough shod over it. So here we are again, but watch this space. And of course that was another subject that we talked about extensively in that interview with John Pullinger.

Ruth Fox: Yeah, so a lot to get our teeth into in the weeks ahead with the legislative program, but I think that's probably all for this week, Mark.

Mark D'Arcy: Don't forget, though, to listen to our interview with Lord Harper, Mark Harper about the progress of the assisted dying bill and whether or not he and some of his allies in the House of Lords have been engaged in a filibuster to try and stop it. And whether or not they now think they've succeeded in doing that.

Ruth Fox: And I'll see you next week when hopefully the international situation may have calmed down, but [00:53:00] possibly not.

Mark D'Arcy: Hope spring's eternal. See you.

Ruth Fox: See you then.

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