The Chairman of Committees
That the 13th Report from the Select Committee (Amendments to the Code of Conduct and the Guide to the Code) (HL Paper 123) be agreed to.
The Chairman of Committees (Lord Sewel)
My Lords, the report proposes changes to the House’s Code of Conduct and the guide to the code, to the rules relating to Members’ staff and to the procedures of the Sub-Committee on Lords’ Conduct and the House of Lords Commissioner for Standards. This report is expected to be the first of two that the committee makes to the House on these issues. It is proposed that a further report will cover a code of conduct for Members’ staff, further guidance on personal honour, and imprisonment of Members. I expect the next report from the committee to be made before Easter.
The report makes 12 recommendations, but I will refer explicitly only to some of them. The proposed changes come from three bodies, two of which will be familiar to Members of your Lordships’ House. The two familiar bodies are the Sub-Committee on Lords’ Conduct, which keeps the code and the guide to the code under regular review, and the Committee on Standards in Public Life, chaired by the noble Lord, Lord Bew. The third body may be less well known to the House so I will take a few words to describe it. The body in question is called GRECO; its full title is the Council of Europe’s Group of States against Corruption. It was established in 1999 with the role of monitoring the compliance of member states of the Council of Europe with agreed anti-corruption standards. It makes recommendations which Council of Europe member states, and certain other countries, are obliged by international treaty to consider and to implement as appropriate.
Some of the recommendations from the Committee for Privileges and Conduct require only brief explanation. The committee recommends that the new description of the seven principles of public life agreed by the Committee on Standards in Public Life should be adopted by the House. The committee also believes that it would help Members if the guide to the code was explicit in stating that the expression of a clear willingness to breach the code, even if no actual breach then takes place, demonstrates a failure to act on one’s personal honour and is therefore a breach of the code. This is not a new principle. It was endorsed by the House in 2009 and has been spelt out in other reports from the committee. The proposal is to set it out concisely in the guide to the code. The committee agrees with the Committee on Standards in Public Life and GRECO that the threshold for registering gifts, benefits and hospitality which relate substantially to membership of the House should be reduced. The recommendation is to bring the threshold into line with the threshold in the Ministerial Code—in other words, a reduction from £500 to £140.
The House will be aware of significant concerns about lobbying of Members and lobbying by Members. The Committee for Privileges and Conduct shares this concern and therefore accepts the GRECO recommendation that Members of the House should have appropriate guidance for dealing with lobbyists. In formulating this guidance, which is in paragraph 8 of the report, the committee has taken pains to balance the legitimate part played by lobbying in the policy-making process with the need to reassure the public that lobbyists are not exerting improper influence over Parliament.
The committee also proposes changes to the rules governing Members’ staff. Given public concern about lobbying, there can be a reasonable perception that anyone employing a person working at the same time for a Member of the House might gain an advantage not available to others. The possession of a parliamentary photo-pass can provide opportunities for contact with Members in the two Houses, so we recommend that Members’ staff sponsored for a parliamentary photo-pass must register the name of any third party that also employs them.
Other recommendations in the report propose small but useful improvements which I hope will help to uphold the standards of conduct in the House. I beg to move.
Lord Marlesford (Con)
My Lords, I would like to refer to just one of the proposals, not on grounds of principle at all—of course, the principle I totally accept—but on grounds of practicality. We must remember that under the rules the threshold for the registration of gifts, benefits and hospitality is cumulative; in other words, more than one gift, benefit or hospitality connected with parliamentary affairs from the same person is registrable. Five hundred pounds is a perfectly reasonable sum; it has been in the past. To reduce it to £140 is a huge reduction, but the real point is that the register of interests is already a massive document. Do we really want to clutter it up even more? One hundred and forty pounds is probably not more than the benefit of lunch twice in one year. Do we really want to clutter it up with trivial things? I have no quarrel at all with the principle; I just question whether a reduction from £500 to £140 is sensible.
Lord Phillips of Sudbury (LD)
My Lords, I would like to suggest that in future, when amendments to the Code of Conduct and the guide are contemplated and put to the House, we should have the equivalent of a Keeling schedule because there are a lot of amendments proposed here to an already long code, and it would be greatly helpful if there were a document which in effect showed what the changes are on the face of the existing code.
The other thing is that I would have hoped that we might have had the opportunity—indeed, we may have but I am unaware of it—to consult on the proposed changes because they affect us intimately. I would have liked to have made some remarks to those who were preparing this document and I am not aware that that opportunity was available.
The Chairman of Committees
My Lords, the reduction from £500 to £140 is of course a matter of judgment. Personally, I see £500 as a worryingly high amount for a gift in relation to parliamentary activity. I think £140 is just about right, quite honestly. On the matter of a schedule that would enable everything to be put into context, when we produce these reports, we show how the changes impact on the present Code of Conduct. As far as consultation is concerned, the first step in consultation must always be through the representatives that the various groups appoint or elect to these committees.