Impact assessment needed for devolution plans, Lords committee warns
No further devolution should take place to parts of the United Kingdom without considering the effect on the Union as a whole, a House of Lords committee claimed today.
In a major report, The Union and devolution, the Lords' Constitution Committee warns that successive UK Governments have taken the Union between England, Northern Ireland, Scotland and Wales for granted, without giving proper consideration to the cumulative impact of devolution on the UK as a whole.
Stating its belief that the nations of the UK are stronger together than apart, the committee adds that any future devolution must not be at the expense of the stability, coherence and viability of the Union.
Identifying key elements underpinning the Union as the economic union, the social union, the political union, the cultural union, and the security and defence union – ending or substantially weakening any of which "would cause grave damage to the integrity of the Union" – the peers call on the UK Government to identify which public responsibilities are essential to the effective functioning of the Union and therefore need to remain at all times the responsibility of the UK Parliament and Government. These should then be protected in any further discussions regarding devolution settlements.
Any future proposals for devolution should come with a detailed devolution impact assessment, including an assessment against the core UK responsibilities, and also addressing whether and how the proposed powers would lead to better outcomes for citizens in the region or nation in question, and what the impact would be on citizens living in other parts of the UK.
The report sets out a number of principles that should underpin any future consideration of devolution, to help ensure that any further demands are considered in a coherent fashion, rather than proceeding "in the haphazard manner that has been evident to date". These include solidarity, diversity, responsiveness, consent, subsidiarity, and clarity.
It adds that power should be devolved to a nation or region only when doing so would benefit the people of that nation or region and would be without detriment to the Union as a whole. Powers should not be devolved simply because theoretically they can be exercised at a lower level of government.
The committee is "strongly opposed" to full fiscal autonomy for the constituent nations of the UK, saying it would "break the Union apart". It wants to see a needs-based system for allocating funds to the nations and regions – as the devolved institutions become responsible for raising and spending more revenue locally, it will become increasingly important that central Government funding is allocated on the basis of need to ensure a fair redistribution of resources across the UK.
Federalism does not provide a solution to the tensions in the constitution, the peers believe. A federal structure would require either an English Parliament, which would introduce a destabilising asymmetry of power to the Union, or elected regional assemblies, which currently lack both public and political support.
And they conclude that provision for any future independence referendum should be set out in primary legislation by the UK Parliament to enable proper scrutiny by representatives of all four nations of the UK.
Committee chairman Lord Lang of Monkton commented: “Since 1999, devolution has been largely demand-led and piecemeal. The committee saw no evidence of strategic thinking about its cumulative impact on the Union as a whole. The Government does not seem to recognise the pressures being placed on the United Kingdom by the ad hoc, reactive manner in which devolution has taken place, and continues to take place."
He added: "Devolved competencies now cover so many areas of public responsibility that the delivery of Government policies often requires collaboration between the UK and devolved Governments. This is not yet being done effectively.
“Instead of the ‘devolve and forget’ attitude of the past, the UK Government should be engaging with the devolved administrations across the whole breadth of Government policy. Not interfering, but co-operating and actively managing the cross-border and UK-wide implications of differing policy and service delivery choices. Shared and overlapping policy areas need to be handled sensibly, with each administration conscious of the interests of the others.”