Nick Herbert MP: The civil service reform we need

Nick Herbert is the MP for Arundel and a former Minister for Policing and Criminal Justice. Follow Nick on Twitter.

Would you take a job where you are accountable for everything, but you cannot appoint or remove your staff, who are accountable for nothing?  Of course not.  Yet that is exactly what we ask ministers to do.  One of the first things you discover as a minister is that civil servants, even those in your own private office, don’t actually work for you.  And since officials can’t be held to account for departmental failings, and ministers can’t meaningfully be held responsible for every detail, the reality is that no-one is accountable at all.

No doubt the public believe that a minister has great power, and of course in some respects they do.  Most of the time, however, I exercised it by making requests to officials in the apologetic manner of Dad’s Army’s Sergeant Wilson: “Would you mind awfully ...?”  Where officials were good, they were very good indeed.  The problem was that where performance was poor - ministerial correspondence in the Home Office was particularly dire - it was extraordinarily difficult to effect change.

Illiterate letters are the least of a government’s problems.  As Richard Bacon MP and Chris Hope have written ahead of their book to be published on Tuesday, the mismanagement of major programmes such as the now-abandoned NHS IT project or the West Coast Mainline franchise has been ruinously expensive.  Yet “the public very rarely sees anyone in Whitehall being held to account for mistakes.  This has created what we have called ‘Teflon civil servants’ – those officials whose career progress appears unaffected by spending cock-ups which have cost taxpayers millions or even billions.”

Nick Herbert MP: On prisoner voting, we shouldn’t defy the ECHR, we should resile from it altogether.

Nick Herbert is the Member of Parliament for Arundel and South Downs and a former Minister for Policing and Criminal Justice. Follow Nick on Twitter.

Today the Government will set out options for giving prisoners the vote. It’s extraordinary to see ministers obliged to propose legislation which they clearly find abhorrent. But the European Court of Human Rights has ruled, in the case of convicted killer John Hirst, that our country’s blanket ban on prisoners voting breaches his rights. Earlier this year, the Government was given six months to ‘introduce legislative proposals to bring the disputed laws in line with the Convention’. That deadline expires today.

It seems that Parliament will be given three options: a limited extension of the vote to prisoners serving sentences of less than six months; a wider enfranchisement of those serving up to four years, and retention of the existing ban.

The proposals raise two principal issues. The first is the merits of the case: should prisoners be given the right to vote? This is debatable, but I don’t believe they should. We deprive criminals of their right to liberty by imprisoning them. There isn’t an absolute right to vote, as even the European Court accepts. And voting is surely a civic right, not a fundamental human right. We don’t, for instance, allow foreigners to help decide our government.

Nick Herbert MP: Ignore the criticisms of Police and Crime Commissioners - we are giving the people a voice

Nick Herbert is the Minister for Policing and Criminal Justice. Follow Nick on Twitter.

Forget the carping about Police and Crime Commissioner elections. It's the summer silly season and the media are landing on anything they can to whip up a story. So - shock, horror - candidates will be disqualified if they have convictions for an imprisonable offence. Just imagine the BBC's sanctimonious reaction if they'd discovered someone standing with a conviction.

And the senior judiciary don't think it's appropriate for Police and Crime Commissioners also to sit as magistrates. Perhaps they have a point. After all, there may be a particular conflict since PCCs will have a statutory role to promote the interests of victims.

Now the critics who complained about the cost of the reform want tens of millions more spent on funding an election address for PCC candidates. But there's no such funding for local elections. And there will be a website with all the candidates' details, plus a printed version for anyone who wants one, plus an Electoral Commission leaflet delivered to every household, plus a national information campaign about the elections. The BBC's claim that independent candidates will "get no help at all" is demonstrably false.

These are all debating issues, and they are beside the main point. The fundamental change is this: on 15th November, for the first time outside London, the public in England and Wales will be able to elect someone to represent their views on crime, hold the police to account, and demand local action.

The police will not be politicised. A statutory protocol protects the operational independence of officers to make arrests and pursue investigations free from political interference. And today I am publishing a draft 'Oath of Impartiality' which newly elected Police and Crime Commissioners will be required to swear publicly on taking office, declaring that they will serve the whole community without fear or favour.

Nick Herbert MP: What the Government's dog tax debacle tells us about this Labour administration

Nick Herbert is Shadow Secretary of State for the Environment, Food and Rural Affairs.

When we launched our campaign and advert last weekend against Labour’s idiotic plan for a dog tax, one or two sage commentators told us that we had better things to do.  So Labour are introducing a new tax, they said.  No surprise there; and there are more important things for the Conservatives to talk about than dogs.

Well, of course there are – and we’re doing so.  Look at David Cameron’s devastating attack this week on Gordon Brown’s links with Unite.  But, actually, by forcing the Government to back down on the dog tax, we’ve just saved 5 million people quite a lot of money.  We’ve helped to give Labour a pretty bad press.  And maybe the whole episode isn’t quite as trivial as the pundits suggest.  Because the dog tax confirmed four things about this dying Government.

First, the ‘get tough on dogs’ package was a typical New Labour attempt to grab an eye-catching headline.  Labour were being tough again, this time on dogs.  And like marching yobs to the cashpoint, the plan unravelled within days.  Labour had thirteen years to come up with a solution to the growing problem of dangerous dogs; they announced their plan just weeks before the election, and it lasted for six days.  Some commentators wanted us to praise the Government for listening and changing its mind.  Oh, come on.  This is a tired and incompetent Government which claims to have substance, but always resorts to spin.

Second, we’re constantly told that the Labour Party is running a well disciplined election machine.  This debacle revealed that, behind the scenes, things may not be quite so harmonious.  Alan Johnson, the friendly former postman who didn’t want to get bitten again, was the front man for the dog announcement.  Hilary Benn, who had actually dreamt up the policy, was nowhere to be seen.  Once the plan started to unravel, the blame game started.  Defra says it was a silly Home Office idea.  The Home Office blames Defra.  We blame the Government.

Nick Herbert is Shadow Secretary of State for the Environment, Food and Rural Affairs.

Nick Herbert: I am determined to curb the power of the supermarkets

Nick Herbert is Shadow Secretary of State for the Environment, Food and Rural Affairs and uses this Platform to answer the TaxPayers' Alliance and others who criticised his recent proposals for a supermarket ombudsman.

Once again, Ministers are playing catch-up.  After dithering for almost two years, the Government has finally announced that it favours the creation of a body to oversee the new Grocery Supply Code of Practice, due to come into force next month.  What sort of entity this would be and what powers it would have, the Government couldn’t say.  They promised – you’ve guessed it – to “consult”.

This belated announcement followed my speech last week to the Oxford Farming Conference where I committed the next Conservative Government to establish a supermarket ombudsman to curb abuses of power by the major food retailers.

While the announcement generally went down well, a few robust contributions to ConHome demurred.  My good friend Shane Frith of Progessive Vision was convinced that we were trying to please British farmers.  For a proud Kiwi where agriculture (as I saw recently) is unsubsidised, that’s clearly a particular sin – and I agree that we should never drive reform in the producer interest.

Spiked Online’s Neil Davenport perceived a deep patrician strain in Toryism that despises supermarkets (of course we don’t) and wants to wage “war against cheaply priced food for the masses” (actually, we’re quite keen on persuading people to vote for us).  But my comrades at the TaxPayers’ Alliance went further, suggesting – ludicrously – that we were advocating a return to the price-fixing established during the First World War.

As the co-founder of the Reform think-tank, I confess that being lectured on economic liberalism is a new experience.  So here, offered in the same spirit, is a little rebuttal.

Nick Herbert MP: My observations on the post-flood clean-up operation in Cumbria

Nick Herbert is the Shadow Secretary of State for the Environment, Food and Rural Affairs. Here he writes exclusively for ConservativeHome to share his observations after a day in Cumbria witnessing the clean-up operation after the floods.

I’ve been in Cumbria today to see the areas affected by the floods.  I arrived early in Keswick where I met officials from the Environment Agency.  Although the river levels had fallen considerably and homes were no longer flooded, the damage to homes had been done.  And the water which had got into houses wasn’t just from the river – it was foul water which had risen from the drains.

I talked to fire crews who were pumping flood water back into the river, and discovered that they were from Tyne & Wear and Lancashire.  They had been called in at an hours’ notice and had been working on the scene ever since, staying at a local hotel.  You cannot fail to be impressed by the professionalism of the emergency services when you see them in action at times like this. 

I then travelled to Cockermouth with our PPC for Workington, Judith Pattinson.  Again, the river levels had abated and a clean-up operation of streets strewn with debris had begun, but hundreds of people had been evacuated from their homes.  We went to one of the rescue centres where evacuees were being given a bed and looked after.  We talked to some elderly people who were drinking tea and demonstrating a marvellous British stoicism.

As well as local government officials and social services professionals, many volunteers from local organisations such as churches and the WI were there to help.  As one shopkeeper who had managed to re-open in the town told me, the community spirit was extraordinary as people stepped in to help each other.  A lady described to me how she had just lent clothes to a neighbour who had lost her entire wardrobe to the flood water.  

The media’s constant question to me was whether we had any criticism of the Government over flood defences.  My response was that this was not a time for recrimination.  The Environment Agency officials told me that the levels of rainfall were unprecedented, and local people said they had never seen the river higher.  Of course, when an area has flooded twice within four years, we will need to look sensibly at what more can be done to protect the local community.  One 88 year-old resident told the BBC that this was the second time she had been evacuated, and on the last occasion it was six months before she was able to return home.

These events will certainly energise debate over the Floods Bill which has just been introduced in the Commons.  In spite of the short amount of time available, we will work constructively with the Government to ensure that essential measures to improve flood defence, following the Pitt Review into the floods of 2007, reach the Statute Book.

But now is a time to thank the emergency services for the superb job which they have done, and in particular to remember PC Bill Barker who died during the rescue efforts last week.  We must think about the people who tonight cannot be in their own homes, and make sure that we don’t forget about them and the ongoing support they will need in the weeks and months ahead.

Nick Herbert MP: The international conservation challenges which a modern Conservative Govenrment must pursue

Nick Herbert is Shadow Secretary of State for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs.

Straight after David Cameron’s speech to the Party Conference in Manchester, I travelled to India, where I spoke at two events and met their Environment Minister, Jairam Ramesh.

Climate change in India is already having a damaging effect on food production and has led to floods and droughts, killing thousands.  Even small further temperature rises could have catastrophic effects.  India itself recognises the need for action.

At a conference in Kerala, I re-stated our commitment to reducing emissions and called for a ‘partnership for environmental security’.  But I warned against a form of ‘environmental colonialism’ which would deny developing countries growth.  The challenge, but also the opportunity, is to pursue sustainable growth.

I then travelled to to Kaziranga National Park in Assam, in the north east of the country, and back to Delhi to address an event on international wildlife conservation hosted by the International Fund for Animal Welfare and the Wildlife Trust of India. 

Kaziranga is a fabulous natural environment, home to elephants, deer, water buffalo and over two-thirds of the world's population of the Great One-horned Rhinoceros, amounting to only a few thousand.  It also boasts the highest concentration of the seriously endangered Indian Tiger in the world.

Indian wildlife faces a range of threats, from climate change, pollution, development and the illegal trade in wildlife, which is an international problem.  Across Africa, armed groups linked to civil wars are now profiting from the illegal ivory trade and using the proceeds of sales to fund their activities, turning the continent's dwindling elephant population into a new cash crop.

In fact, the illegal international wildlife trade is worth over £6 billion a year and is the third biggest trade after drugs trafficking and arms.  IFAW has described this as the ‘greatest problem for the protection of elephants in Africa.’  Yesterday’s immoral trade was ‘blood diamonds’.  Today’s is blood ivory.

This trade was fuelled recently when, despite the ban on trade in ivory that we introduced two decades ago, the Government failed to object to a sale of stockpiled ivory.  Britain should be taking a lead and demanding that all elephant ivory – from whatever source – is prohibited for trade.  We should be choking demand for ivory, not stoking it.

Nick Herbert MP: The consumer should be king and free trade must flourish - but we have a right to know when we are buying British

Nick Herbert is Shadow Secretary of State for the Environment, Food and Rural Affairs.

I don’t usually go to the pub at 10am in the morning, but Monday was an exception.  We were gathered at an event for the Honest Food campaign at the Coach and Horses, a terrific gastropub in Clerkenwell, London.

While guests sampled a delicious brunch from the pub’s kitchen, as well as oysters from Essex, mutton from Wales, apple juice from Kent and cheese from Worcestershire - all organised by the Slow Food movement - there was a serious purpose to the meeting.

I was able to announce that Tesco has decided to support the Honest Food campaign and change some 1,000 of its food labels.  This is a hugely significant step forward for the campaign, which I launched earlier this year in an attempt to end the misleading labelling of meat and to empower consumers to make informed choices about the food they buy.

The simple premise is that people have a right to know where their food comes from, and that the current system, which allows a pork pie made in this country from foreign pork to be labelled as British, is wrong.  It is also damaging.  Misleading labelling has undermined the improvements in farm animal welfare which we have made in this country, disadvantaging our farmers as well as deceiving consumers.

I would not want to see restraints on free trade even if they were legal – after all, Britain has important food export markets of our own.  I believe that the consumer should be king, free to choose food from this country or any other.  But real choice requires real information.  As Jamie Oliver and others have demonstrated so effectively, consumers can find it difficult to back British producers if they want to because of inadequate labelling.

Nick Herbert MP: Rural communities ignored by Labour are crying out to be heard - and the Conservatives have an agenda to revitalise them

Nick Herbert MP is Shadow Secretary of State for the Environment, Food and Rural Affairs.

Rural England has suffered a decade of disrespect by Labour.  Quiet communities have become angered by a Government which won’t even listen, still less give them a say.  Local services have been withdrawn, rural communities have been denied a voice, and power has been taken away from local people.

Yesterday, Jim Paice MP – the Shadow Minister for Agriculture and Rural Affairs – and I launched Rural Action, the Conservative agenda to revitalise our rural communities.  We are setting out solid proposals to empower rural communities, protect rural services, respect rural people and revive the rural economy.  And we are also launching a grassroots campaign, Conservative Rural Action, to promote our ideas throughout the countryside (also marked by this video posted on ConservativeHome yesterday).

Many of the challenges people face in the countryside are currently ignored because they are masked by an appearance of prosperity.  But 1.6 million people are living in rural poverty.  Motoring costs in rural areas are higher and public transport is thin on the ground.  And there is a serious shortage of affordable housing.

Labour has exacerbated these problems by failing to appreciate the social value of rural institutions such as post offices, village pubs and small shops.  1,400 rural post offices have disappeared since the year 2000.  There are now 200 fewer rural schools than when Labour came to power.  384 police stations closed in the shires in Labour’s first two terms.

Nick Herbert MP: Prisons with a reforming purpose

In the third part of ConservativeHome's 'A Government Worth Having' series, Nick Herbert MP, Shadow Secretary of State for Justice, outlines his prisons reform agenda.

The BBC’s ‘Criminal Justice’ drama depicts bullying and violence in prisons.  Channel 5’s ‘Banged Up’ sees David Blunkett in a mock jail, lamenting his failure to invest in turning around young offenders’ lives.  When prisons are the subject of prime time drama and reality TV in a single week, you know something is up.

Labour’s overcrowded prisons, awash with drugs, aren’t working.  Reconviction rates have risen and the Government is releasing 30,000 offenders early in a single year.  No potential government could afford to ignore this crisis.  But for modern Conservatives, prison reform isn’t just a necessity of political management.  It’s a vital component of an ambitious crime agenda that aims to mend each broken link in the chain of our criminal justice system.  So, in March, David Cameron and I outlined our plans for radical reform to create ‘Prisons with a Purpose’.

Prisons are needed to punish and incapacitate serious and repeat offenders, and deter others. That’s why this week we’ve said that anyone caught carrying a knife in public should expect to go to jail.  But no criminal justice policy can rely simply on catching more offenders and incarcerating them for longer.  Prisons must also rehabilitate offenders.  Our aim should be for criminals to emerge the other side of jail less likely to offend again.

The precondition of reform is ensuring adequate capacity, because no effective rehabilitation can take place in overcrowded jails.  That’s why we are committed to creating 5,000 additional prison places explicitly to reduce overcrowding and take pressure off the system.  We will redevelop the estate so that new capacity is built in small, local jails, where prisoners can receive more effective rehabilitation, and be held closer to their families and the communities to which they will return.

But our plans go far beyond the logistics of prison capacity.  The current system needs fundamental structural reform.  Currently two-thirds of prisoners will be reconvicted within two years of release.  Simply put, re-offending has not been reduced because it is nobody’s job to reduce it.  We will create accountability by transforming prisons into Prison and Rehabilitation Trusts and paying them by results, awarding a premium if they prevent prisoners from re-offending.

Nick Herbert MP: We need a genuine zero tolerance of knife crime

Nick Herbert, MP for Arundel & South Downs and Shadow Secretary of State for Justice, sets out the Conservative position on knife crime.

Four weeks ago, after canvassing for Boris in South East London, I joined locals for a drink at the Metro bar in Sidcup.  So it was especially shocking to discover that this suburban bar, next to a commuter station, was where 18-year-old Rob Knox was stabbed to death last Saturday.

Time and time again on the doorsteps we heard voters volunteer their concern about crime.  Their experience is completely divorced from the complacent litany of statistics, often doctored, which Ministers trot out to tell us how much safer we should all feel.  No-one believes these claims.  Last week, the country’s most senior criminal judge, Sir Igor Judge, said that knife crime was now reaching “epidemic proportions”.  Far from hyperbole or moral panic, there is good evidence that knife crime is getting worse.

A Home Office survey found that 4% of young people aged 10-25 admitted to carrying a knife.  That might not sound many, until you realise that it equates to almost half a million young people who are walking around in public with an offensive weapon – the majority of which are flick knives (outlawed in 1959), kitchen knives or other aggressive designs, not humble pen knives.

Nick Herbert MP: We must act now to avoid growing conflict between politicians and judges

Nick Herbert MP, Shadow Secretary of State for Justice, authors this extended Platform article on the Conservative approach to the role of the judiciary in today's Britain.

> The independence of the judiciary is under threat from Government attempts to fetter judges and judges being drawn into political decisions

Alexander Hamilton described the judiciary as the “least dangerous” branch of government because it possessed neither the power of the purse nor the power of the sword.  The independence of the judiciary is not just one of the components of the rule of law; it is an absolute prerequisite for it.  But this independence is under threat, both from direct attempts by the Government to fetter the judiciary, and from developments which are drawing judges into the political arena.

Judicial autonomy is threatened when governments seek to limit the ability of judges to do justice in individual cases.  Legislation currently before Parliament would enable Ministers to remove coroners from inquests if they deem it ‘in the public interest’ and prevent magistrates from giving suspended prison sentences for summary-only offences.  Perhaps most worryingly, Jack Straw is proposing a Sentencing Commission, which would take into account the impact on the prison population when setting sentencing guidelines.  This is simply wrong.  It is the job of the Government to ensure we have the prison places we need to accommodate all those who judges feel need to be incarcerated, not to restrict sentences because they have failed to provide adequate prison capacity.

The judiciary are not only the protectors of the rule of law: they are themselves subject to the principle.  The principle that Parliament makes the law and the judiciary uphold and enforce it – even against the Government when it is the executive which is breaking the law – is not only sound, it is democratically essential.  That’s why it is of concern that some judges have started to question the sovereignty of Parliament, talking instead of a “dual sovereignty of the Crown in Parliament and a Crown in the courts”.  Lord Steyn has described the principle of parliamentary sovereignty as “a construct of the common law” and suggested that a different constitutional hypothesis may apply in future.  Lord Hope has gone further to suggest that “the English principle of absolute legislative sovereignty of Parliament … is being qualified”.  Both Law Lords were speaking in the context of a case concerning the validity of the Hunting Act.  Proponents of a new constitutional settlement should perhaps stop and consider their reaction if this controversial Act had been struck down by the courts.

> We should not be handing essentially political decisions over to the courts

Parliamentary sovereignty means that law is made, and if necessary unmade, by elected Members, who are democratically accountable to the people.  Simply removing hard decisions – like whether to drop prosecutions that give rise to national security concerns or to deport terrorist suspects – from the hands of Ministers and handing them over to the courts does not depoliticise decision-making: it politicises the judiciary.  If judges start to determine questions which are in essence political, then people will rightly wonder for whom they speak and to whom they should answer.  As US Supreme Court Justice Antonin Scalia has put it, “if judges are routinely providing the society’s definitive answers to moral questions on which there is ample room for debate – rather than merely determining the meaning of democratically adopted texts – then judges will be made politically accountable”.

In other jurisdictions judges are appointed by politicians or are subjected to confirmatory hearings by the legislature.  Justice Scalia remarked that he was unhappy about the intrusion of politics into the judicial appointment process in the US, but he preferred it to the alternative, “government by judicial aristocracy”.  Neither is desirable in Britain.  But the continuing independence of the judiciary requires that judges are not drawn into the political arena.