Privileges and Conduct Committee: 15th Report
The Chairman of Committees
That the 15th Report from the Select Committee (Further amendments to the Code of Conduct and Guide to the Code of Conduct) (HL Paper 182) be agreed to.
The Chairman of Committees (Lord Sewel)
My Lords, this is the second set of changes to the Code of Conduct and the Guide to the Code of Conduct that we have considered in the past two months. This 15th Report makes three recommendations. The first section of the report establishes a stronger link between the requirements of the Code of Conduct and the system of financial support for Members. To this end, the Committee for Privileges and Conduct proposes that a sentence be added to the relevant claim form stating that, in making each claim, the Member concerned should have regard to the obligation in the Code of Conduct to act on their personal honour. It also proposes that the Guide to the Code of Conduct be amended to emphasise further the fact that Members should follow not only the letter of the rules but also the spirit of the rules and the sense of the House when claiming financial support.
The vast majority of Members make claims for financial support that are beyond reproach, but public concerns about isolated examples of abuse remain. The changes proposed should serve to highlight the importance of all Members acting on their personal honour, and they reinforce the need for the highest standards of propriety in this area.
The second section of the report proposes a code of conduct for Members’ staff. This follows a recommendation from the Council of Europe Group of States against Corruption. The new code sets out the requirements imposed on Members’ staff, most of which already exist but have not previously been set out in one place. The new code for Members’ staff also lays down some general principles guiding the conduct of Members’ staff in their parliamentary work—for example, that Members’ staff should not use their access to the Parliamentary Estate to engage in lobbying.
The final section of the report relates to the imprisonment of Members. The House of Lords Reform (No. 2) Bill is expected to receive its Third Reading after this debate. That Bill provides that a Member who is sentenced to imprisonment for more than one year will cease to be a Member of the House. However, if the conviction is outside the United Kingdom, the Member will cease to be a Member only if the House resolves as such.
The Bill addresses the most serious cases where Members have breached the criminal law. However, we think that the House should make provision for the Code of Conduct to deal with cases of imprisonment that do not fall under the Bill. If the Bill becomes law in its current form, the Code of Conduct need cover only those situations where a Member is sentenced to, first, imprisonment for up to and including one year; secondly, a suspended term of imprisonment; or, thirdly, imprisonment for over a year outside the UK where the House has not resolved that the Member should cease to be a Member.
Accordingly, we consider that it should be deemed a breach of the Code of Conduct for a Member to be sentenced to imprisonment, whether in the UK or elsewhere, for any length of time, including suspended sentences. Where that is the case, the Sub-Committee on Lords’ Conduct will recommend an appropriate sanction. We recognise that there is a need for safeguards in respect of convictions in foreign jurisdictions and we recommend a scheme that takes account of this. That is necessary because a situation could arise when someone could be convicted in a common court for an activity that is not a crime in this country, or, indeed, for something which would be praiseworthy in this country.
Together with the 13th Report of the committee, which the House agreed on 6 March, I believe that this 15th Report will make significant progress in strengthening our system governing conduct. I am, of course, happy to answer questions. I beg to move.
Lord Richard (Lab)
My Lords, I have listened with great interest to what the Chairman of Committees has said in relation to this report and, indeed, to the previous ones in relation to Lord Hanningfield. I am bound to say that the more I listened to it, the more disturbed I got. Are we not now in a somewhat strange position? For a person to be able to claim his allowances, first, he has to be seen by the House or the committee, and, secondly, he has to do parliamentary work. One can easily imagine a situation in which you will be doing parliamentary work for almost the whole of the day without setting foot inside the Chamber or appearing in front of a Select Committee. In those circumstances, noble Lords would presumably do what Lord Hanningfield did—although he did not do the parliamentary work—which is turn up and be seen by somebody here, and then, on your honour, you will have fulfilled both conditions.
I am not raising this point in defence of Lord Hanningfield at all. I am merely pointing out that the present situation almost invites a situation in which people turn up in the House just so that they can be seen in order to fulfil the legitimate requirements before they can get their allowances. I do not know whether anything can be done about this—I suspect that the answer is probably not. However, I would like the Chairman of Committees at least to give us an indication of whether they are thinking about it.
Lord Berkeley of Knighton (CB)
My Lords, I very much welcome the proposal of the Chairman of Committees. It is the least that we can do regarding prison sentences. I am sure the noble Lord will agree that, among the general public, there is an absolute incomprehension that people who have been convicted of serious crimes, and have therefore served prison sentences, can go on being Members of this House. I have had that said to me time and again, and I am sure he will agree that it is a conundrum that we have to solve.
Lord Phillips of Sudbury (LD)
My Lords, I am grateful to the Committee for its work in producing these reports. Nothing can be more difficult, I think, than trying to put into words the circumstances in which we can claim our £300 or £150 a day tax free.
I hope the Chairman will forgive me if I raise one or two points on the Committee’s latest formulation. I am sorry that I did not raise these points with him in advance but, like many noble Lords, I only got round to looking in detail at the new proposals today. However, we know enough about the expenses scandal and the Lord Hanningfield case—and, I fear, others—to know that the language of our self-restraint, if one might call it that, is very important. It does not help to leave that language too rubbery and too open to different interpretation. For example, in the latest formulation, paragraph 4.1.3 of the Guide to Financial Support for Members talks about “appropriate parliamentary work”. However, the claim form simply talks about “parliamentary work”; there is no reference to “appropriate”. Paragraph 8 of the Guide to the Code of Conduct talks about Members in the discharge of our “parliamentary duties”—“duties” as opposed to “work”, and “work” as opposed to “appropriate parliamentary work”. Those three phrases are more than capable, and with some justification, of different interpretations. I urge the Chairman and his committee to consider that point with a view to further amendments, because we do not want any more of this.
I would also like to add, if I may, that there is constant reference to “honour” and to a “sense of the House”—a breach of honour according to the sense of the House. There is absolutely no guidance on what the sense of the House might be in any circumstances. I understand that you cannot find a form of words that will be clear in every circumstance, but I again put it to the Chairman that he might consider that the committee should have a number of scenarios in which it says that it would be contrary to our honour, in those circumstances, to claim or not to claim.
I am afraid that these are issues that the press are looking at closely. Lord Hanningfield himself, in the Daily Mirror article last July, talked of 50 other Peers clocking in and clocking out as he did. I really hope that we do not leave ourselves in the position where we are vulnerable to another wholesale attack on what is going on here, with us apparently doing nothing about it. If any of your Lordships claimed for the full 139 sitting days last year, that would have come to £41,700 tax free. If you gross that up, it is a lot of money, and I am afraid that we remain unduly vulnerable. This is something that we need to address, because the work of this House is of such crucial importance.
Lord Geddes (Con)
My Lords, I have read the report and listened most carefully to the Chairman of Committees. This is probably down to my gross mental inadequacy, but could the Chairman of Committees explain more fully to the House the difference between the sanction proposed for imprisonments of under one year and that for imprisonments of over one year?
The Chairman of Committees
I will make a general point first. This House has responded to individual abuses of the scheme in a way which has shown that it has not been prepared to duck the issue: it has tightened the regime, and tightened it quite significantly over a period of months and years. That is to the credit of this House as a self-regulating House in the full and proper sense of the word. I agree that many people, including some of your Lordships, are enormously frustrated that because of the Writ of Summons, it has not been possible to move to exclude individual Peers even in the most severe circumstances. However, that has now been tackled through the new legislation and through what we are putting in place here.
On the detailed point about the difference between imprisonments of over one year and those under one year, imprisonments of over one year mean that it is going to be expulsion while for those under one year the House will work out a sanction for itself. That is the difference: under one year it is not automatic expulsion while over one year it is.
I will deal with the point made by the noble Lord, Lord Richard. The commissioner has said that there are two conditions that your Lordships have to fulfil to make a valid claim. He has come to that on the basis of what we have agreed in the Guide to the Code of Conduct, the Guide to Financial Support for Members and the certificate that we sign when we make our claims. On the basis of those documents, two conditions have to be met. The first is that the Peer has to be present in the Chamber or at a committee meeting—presence has to be established. However, that in itself is not a complete fulfilment of the conditions.
The second condition is that parliamentary work has to be undertaken for every day that is claimed. That is not defined, and it would be very difficult to get into definitions, but it rests on the concept of personal honour. When this concept of personal honour started to be developed, I was one of those who thought that it was rather a woolly notion and could be easily evaded by someone saying, “Well, in my view, I did act on my personal honour and who are you to say that I did not?”. However, it has proved an enormously powerful concept, because we have got to the stage where it has been operationally developed and applied to cases where it was made abundantly clear that the individuals concerned had not acted in terms of personal honour. The definition is not a subjective definition: it is a more objective definition based on the meaning of personal honour in a particular case and how it would be interpreted by the House generally. That has proved to be the basis on which five people have been suspended, so it has had a very strong and robust application.