Grand Committee
House of Lords Conduct Committee: Code of Conduct Review
Baroness Manningham-Buller
That the Grand Committee takes note of the review by the Conduct Committee of the House of Lords code of conduct.
Baroness Manningham-Buller (CB)
My Lords, this is not going to be a conventional debate. I am not going to pose as a Minister, attempt to sum up or answer or deflect questions. The aim of the debate is for me to listen—other members of the committee are here—and feed noble Lords’ views and opinions into the review that we have in hand, on which we have already had some excellent contributions, including from people in this Room, and on which we are continuing to take evidence until the end of October. This debate was suggested by some Peers. I welcome it because it is a further opportunity for us to collect information before we come back to the House, probably towards the end of this year—perhaps early next year —with our recommendations for changes to the code. We hope we will get as broad a range as possible.
I come to the timetable. Following the launch of the review in April, the suggestion of the Conduct Committee—it was our view—was that the code needs reform. This was disrupted by the Dissolution of Parliament in late May, so we have extended the deadline for contributions until the end of this month. For the record, I ask Peers who wish to say things but who are not able to be here this afternoon to please write to us, because we want to have all views. Also, party leaders and the convenor are coming to give evidence quite soon, so another way would be to put contributions to them.
Let me say something about the scope of the review. We start with the existing code. As your Lordships’ Conduct Committee, we operate within parameters agreed by the House over many years. These include the House’s decision in 2009 to appoint an independent Commissioner for Standards—at that stage, I also chaired the precursor of this committee, the Sub-Committee on Lords’ Conduct—and its related decision a decade later, in 2019, to appoint four lay members of the committee to add to the five Peers who sit on it. I take this opportunity to thank the commissioners—we now have two of them—and lay members for their insight and help.
Why are we suggesting a review? There are several reasons. The code and its guide are too long. Regular amendments since the first major overhaul in 2009 have led to the code and the related guide, taken together, doubling in length since 2010. Some changes have been forced on us by statutory change or outside events or to clarify points of uncertainty—for example, in the processes of investigation or the rules governing financial issues. With the greater length has come complexity with, for example, the distinction between general principles and specific rules being unclear. It is a bit of a patchwork document which may confuse. It is also clear that many Members have never actually read it and have certainly not got to appendix B.
I know that some noble Lords feel that we need only a simple statement of general principles of conduct. I agree that the code should articulate these principles clearly, including the Nolan principles, that guide us as Members of the House. However, it is worth pointing out that the Code of Conduct is not just to guide Members but to reinforce public confidence in the House. To that extent, it is an outward-facing as well as inward-facing document. It is clear from the comments we get that the public, whom we serve collectively, expect Members of the House of Lords, like MPs or other public servants, to abide by clear rules requiring high standards of conduct to try to ensure that we meet the Nolan principles of openness, accountability, selflessness, objectivity—that of course is not possible in politics, but never mind; the others still stand—integrity, honesty, and leadership.
The registration of relevant interests lies at the heart of this. In past generations, noble Lords declared their interests in debate, largely for the benefit of other Members, but for the past 30 years it has been accepted that we should make those disclosures in a public and lasting form, by means of the register. To support the process, we need clear rules, covering categories of interests, thresholds for registration and so on. Expectations of radical change to the code probably need to be tempered, because some length and complexity will be difficult to avoid. I am none the less of the view that we can make it very much better than it currently is.
It is also clear that some noble Lords feel that the reach of the code has gone too far and are apprehensive that this review is another excuse for mission creep. I assure all noble Lords that it is not. The committee, including the lay members, fully understands the value to this House of our Members having extensive experience, in many cases elsewhere, and bringing it to bear on current issues.
We have asked some difficult questions in our call for evidence, but these are questions that regularly reach us. That is why we need noble Lords’ views. A particularly difficult question is whether there should be a general rule to prohibit conduct that causes significant reputational damage to the House as a whole. This is not a new issue. Our predecessor committee, the Committee for Privileges and Conduct, recommended such a rule as far back as 2016 in a report entitled Undermining Public Confidence in the House. That report was never taken to the Floor of the House and nor has the Conduct Committee ever brought forward firm proposals, despite repeatedly being invited to consider the issue, usually in the wake of some media uproar. There is no easy answer and it may still be too difficult, but it is right that we are asked the question once more.
We aim to satisfy ourselves that the code is fit for purpose and the rules are expressed as clearly and succinctly as possible. I will end there. I emphasise that we really are listening. We see this as an evidence-collecting session. I welcome the proposal that we do this, but I will not respond in detail, as I said at the beginning, because we have not had all the evidence in yet; we still have to hear from the heads of the parties, the convenor and the Leader of the House. Then we will be ready, at some stage, to put proposals to your Lordships’ House. I thank noble Lords for coming. We will listen very carefully.
Baroness Donaghy (Lab)
My Lords, I am very pleased to speak after the noble Baroness, Lady Manningham-Buller. I had the privilege of serving under her as a member of the Conduct Committee. I am no longer a member, but I felt that this was an issue which needed people to speak out on it. Now is not the time to be seen to go backwards on standards. As well as having been a member of the Conduct Committee, I was on the appointment panel for the two Commissioners for Standards, one of whom has just taken up a new role outside Parliament. I was also on the appointment panel for the independent lay members; I am pleased that at least two of them are here today. I was also co-opted on to the predecessor committee, along with the noble Baronesses, Lady Anelay and Lady Hussein-Ece, to prepare for the new rules around sexual harassment and bullying. So, as your Lordships can see, it is all my fault.
Perhaps I should repeat that I was a member of the Committee on Standards in Public Life—it is good to see the noble Lord, Lord Evans of Weardale, who I think is now the former chair—and I was an interim chair of that committee in 2007.
We need a system which is sufficiently robust to see off the frivolous and vexatious cases that anybody in public life is subject to—that is a given. I think there is an increased feeling of vulnerability among Peers and, to a much greater extent, MPs. However, as the noble Baroness, Lady Manningham-Buller, said, this is an outward-facing exercise, and anything that looks as if we are trying to water things down will go down extremely badly with members of the public.
I, like others, left the Chamber while the noble Lord, Lord True, was speaking on the one-year anniversary of the Hamas attack. As usual, his tone and response was wholly appropriate. I just remind noble Lords that he said, when the code was being debated in May:
“The Chief Whip and I have taken the liberty of discussing this with some colleagues in the usual channels and, of course, with my noble friend Lady Manningham-Buller, the chair of the Conduct Committee, in whose work I think I fairly say the House has the fullest confidence and trust … The Motion will be neutrally worded to enable all Members to express their—no doubt varying—views before the evidence-taking period concludes. The purpose must not be to rake over the coals of specific cases ”.—[Official Report, 20/5/24; col. 863.]
I will not quote the rest of it but I thought that it was an extremely useful statement, and I see this as the continuity of that particular effort.
I do not want to go on for a long time and I will certainly not suggest detailed changes. To some extent, this is a necessary tidying-up exercise, and I thought that this was what the Conduct Committee was trying to do. It had left open questions which had been asked over a number of years, and the answers may well be the same. However, it is quite right that it should ask those questions, such as about bringing the House generally into disrepute. Should we take that forward or leave it well alone and keep the issue of “on one’s personal honour” as a way of interpreting cases?
I do not have an awful lot to say except something about the importance of the confidence from staff. It is not that long ago that staff did not really have much confidence in any complaints being dealt with fairly. They would say to new members of staff, “Don’t go into the lift with that person”. These issues were well known; they were not well known to us as Peers but were well known among staff. There was no confidence that any complaint would be upheld or dealt with fairly, and it is not that long ago. It is extremely important to recall that staff will listen to this debate and get a feeling of the direction that we want to go in. Even though that is not part of the public point of view, it is extremely important from the internal point of view that we have a system which means that staff feel that they are dealt with fairly. When we first took over as a Conduct Committee, some of the cases were of extremely long-standing. They were called historical cases, which just meant that somebody had been misbehaving for a very long time indeed and had not been dealt with. We do not want to go back to those bad old days.
I have an open mind about a number of the questions that the Conduct Committee has asked. I shall put my views in, but I wanted to make the point that the world will be looking at us to make sure that we are not slipping backwards. If we have different processes from the House of Commons, that is absolutely fine, as long as our standards are the same. That is the difference. The processes have to be different because MPs are elected and have a larger number of members of staff—and to some extent the issue of salary versus fee income is a difference. We do not need necessarily to be consistent in our processes. I happen to think that our system is better, because the role of the commissioners has made it better, but that is not to say that the standards are different. I would defend that difference as not being harmful in any way.
I should have declared—I apologise for not doing so earlier—that I chair the Steering Group for Change, which was set up by the commission. That has been working for five years. It started off as a response to the Ellenbogen report about sexual harassment and bullying, but is now moving into wider directions of how we consolidate the culture change in the House, which I firmly believe has improved since the Conduct Committee was established, with the wonderful work that the members do—both the Peers and the individual lay members.
Lord Forsyth of Drumlean (Con)
I thank the noble Baroness, Lady Manningham-Buller, for giving us this opportunity and for the brilliant way in which she has carried out the chairmanship of this committee, which I hope will go on for many more years. It is a pleasure to follow the noble Baroness, Lady Donaghy, who is very wise—and I think that we are all grateful for the work that she has done. However, the world has changed a bit, and we need to reflect that.
The noble Baroness, Lady Manningham-Buller, said at the beginning that the code was too long and too detailed, and I could not agree more. It is not just that it takes a long time to read it. Incidentally, the copies that have been provided in the Printed Paper Office do not include the appendices that were in the original document, including appendix B on page 56, paragraphs 19 and 20 of which were frankly just offensive. I hope that the fact that they are not included means that they are going to disappear for the foreseeable future.
There are trivial complaints made that should really be dealt with by the usual channels and not by the commissioner, and an abuse of the complaints system for political purposes is now happening, often through social media. The reputational damage done to an individual who may be subject to a vexatious complaint when the complaint is made public is enormous. The noble Baroness, Lady Donaghy, urged us not to talk about individual cases, but I am going to talk about one. We can see what has happened to the noble Lord, Lord Alli. Someone apparently made a complaint that he had not declared a particular interest. I do not know whether that is right or wrong, but it has resulted in pages and pages and day after day of coverage about him, and he is in a position where he is not allowed to comment on this or defend himself, which to my mind is neither fair nor right. One sees people doing this again and again. I do not make this accusation about any one party; we all have people in political parties who think that this is an appropriate way to behave, but I do not.
The other issue that worries me, which is again to do with Members’ vulnerability, is that if the commissioner is investigating a particular complaint Members are not allowed to have any legal representation.
Baroness Manningham-Buller (CB)
I said I was not going to interrupt. Anybody can have legal representation. That is not improper. What they cannot do is ask their lawyer to answer the questions for them. In fact, most people who are subject to serious allegations seek legal advice immediately and have it beside them at all stages.
Lord Forsyth of Drumlean (Con)
I am aware of that; it is actually spelled out in the document on the basis that this is seen not as a legalistic procedure but as a more informal one. However, if your entire reputation is on the line, you should be able to have the basic standards of natural justice. In the case of a criminal prosecution, for example, no one would argue that your lawyer should not be able to make representations on your behalf. It is the business of confidentiality not being able to share that with colleagues; that is probably observed more often in the breach but, if you have been wrongly accused of something, it is all over the newspapers and you are not allowed to talk to any of your colleagues to get advice and help, that is a very unpleasant position to be left in. There is also the issue that it takes for ever for the matter to be decided. By the time it is, if you have been found to have been traduced, nobody is interested. You might get a single line in a newspaper. I worry about the process.
I am conscious of the strictures of the noble Baroness, Lady Donaghy, not to mention particular cases, but I also worry about a recent case where the commissioner decided on a particular sanction and then asked the complainant what they thought of the sanction. The commissioner then changed the sanction to make it more severe as a result of talking to the complainant. To me, that feels a little dodgy, to put it mildly. It is true that, in the legal system, we take evidence from people who have been subjected to a crime about its impact on them, but we do not allow them to decide what the sentence should be.
Picking up the comment made by the noble Baroness, Lady Donaghy, I agree that the House of Lords is different from the House of Commons. We should be. However, we are a part-time House while the Commons is a full-time House. Look at the sanctions that are applied in the other place: if people who have committed quite serious breaches of the code there and done some pretty stupid things are suspended for more than a set number of days, they can find themselves subject to a recall petition. The sanctions over exclusion therefore tend to be small numbers of days. However, colleagues in this House have been excluded for months—six months, in one case. The difference is that, in the House of Commons, if you are excluded for less than the recall period, you continue to be paid and to receive all your allowances, while Members of this House are unable to gain any of their allowances and go unpaid. Therefore, an extended period of exclusion is a far more severe penalty than would apply to Members of the House of Commons. Although I accept that we should be different, I do not really see why we should have such broadly different tariffs for breaches of the codes.
The other issue where I hope we will be different is where people have been accused of some criminal offence. It is essential that any decision to exclude them should be made only after they have been charged, not on arrest, for the obvious reason of maintaining the principle of innocent until proven guilty. I know that a different view has been taken in the other place but I very much agree with the noble Baroness, Lady Donaghy, that we should decide our own rules on these matters—although that does create a slight anomaly.
I am also worried about what I would describe as the committee’s mission creep; the chairman touched on that. It is highly inappropriate that Peers’ conduct not related to their parliamentary activities or role should be within the scope of the commissioner. I do not think that it is for him or her to look at that. I also cannot for the life of me understand why, under the code, you have to inform the Clerk of the House if you are subject to an investigation by a professional body. What has that got to do with the Clerk of the House? A doctor subject to a complaint to the GMC would have to tell the Clerk of the House about that. Why is that appropriate? Why should a company chairman, perhaps found to be in breach of health and safety legislation and subject to an investigation by the HSE, have to tell the Clerk of the House? What business is that of the House of Lords?
It is just wrong. We have a number of Peers in high-profile public and private roles. Where does it end? Does it apply to a head teacher who is accused of breaching employment law, or to a landlord/tenant dispute? I felt that the noble Baroness, Lady Donaghy, got quite close to touching on this: there seems to be a suspicion growing that anything that damages the reputation of a Peer damages the reputation of the House. That cannot be right, and it is dangerous.
There was a recent example in the debate the other day about VAT on school fees. A colleague on the Government Benches made an accusation about what had happened in a particular school. Someone then said that it was not true and made a complaint to the commissioner and, as a result, got a whole load of coverage about this person having misled the House. The newspapers put it rather more strongly than that. It is none of the business of the commissioner to look at what is said in the Chamber. Lots of things are said in the Chamber that are a matter for debate. If people think that someone has misled the House in some way, there are lots of processes by which that can be corrected or debated. I worry about the idea of mission creep and the perception of the role of the commissioner. They will say, “We’ve had a complaint that so-and-so didn’t tell the House the truth”, which then becomes a story. That is a real-life example. This is not a partisan point; in both cases I am defending people who are members of the government party. I was going to say opposition party, but that is me now.
I am sure that the independent members of the Conduct Committee do a great job, but I worry about the balance between external members and people who have detailed knowledge of parliamentary procedure and an understanding of the political process. I wonder if the balance is too far in one direction. An example of that is the requirement to declare your interests. It is absolutely impossible to declare your interests at Question Time without irritating the House. Therefore, people stand up and say, “I refer to my interests in the register”, which is frankly a waste of time. We do not have the register and we do not know what the interests are. If you are watching from the outside, you think, “Ah, he or she must be in someone’s pay”. It is a fatuous requirement. We end up in a situation where people are breaching the code, as is explained in the document.
I also want to re-emphasise the difference between paid advocacy, which is speaking in the House or to Ministers specifically about a business interest—it is quite rightly forbidden—and speaking on the generality of policy, which may impact negatively on a company from which they receive payment. While I was chairing a bank, I never asked any questions about issues which affected the bank because I felt vulnerable to being accused of paid advocacy, even though I know that the rules would have provided for the general position. It is undoubtedly the case that people are afraid of speaking on certain areas because this is not widely understood. Because it is not widely understood, mischievous journalists can make hay from it.
In short, I really welcome what the chairman of the committee said, because the committee needs to rewrite the code and to undertake a review of the approach which is taken, so that it takes account of the impact of social media and the increasing exposure of Members to unjustified reputational damage from malign political influences.
Lord Hope of Craighead (CB)
My Lords, it is a pleasure for me to follow the noble Lord, Lord Forsyth. I wish particularly to endorse what he said about the dangers of mission creep, particularly the risk that complaints made about things that we say in the House might be taken forward as a ground for some criticism under the guide.
I join the noble Lord in welcoming and congratulating the noble Baroness, Lady Manningham-Buller, on securing this debate and on the way she opened it, as it were for general discussion rather than anything else so that we can really put across ideas and they can be taken on board by the committee.
I am afraid that, as a lawyer, I have fallen into the trap of looking into the words of the code to see whether I can find things wrong with it. I have picked up three questions which are in the call for evidence. The first is whether there are
“any elements of the Code and Guide”
which are “unclear or confusing”, the second is whether any
“provisions of the Code or Guide”
are “unnecessary”, and the third is how
“the presentation of the Code and Guide”
could be
“improved, to make it more accessible and user-friendly”.
I will take the first two questions together, because my points about them relate to a particular issue, which is the way the guide deals with the registration of interests by arbitrators. I have to declare an interest here because I sometimes engage in international arbitration. I am engaged in one just now, which is listed in the register, as I was nominated to act as one of three arbitrators by a foreign state; that is declared in the register, and I have no complaint about that.
The introduction of this requirement into the code had a rather uncomfortable birth. It was suggested that it was needed for reasons of national security. It is not unusual for those who engage in arbitration to be nominated by the Government of a foreign state or an organisation controlled by a foreign state. However, the then chairman of the committee, the noble and learned Lord, Lord Mance, had to recuse himself because he was engaged in many of these arbitrations and felt he should not take part in the debate. The discussion was then chaired by Lord Brown of Eaton-under-Heywood, the only remaining lawyer, who found himself in a minority of one when the matter was debated.
The matter then came before the House for approval. The noble Baroness, Lady Donaghy, is smiling at me because, like me, she remembers very well the nature of that debate. It was—I think I can put it this way—rather highly charged. Those noble Lords who opposed the proposal, which did not include myself, were all arbitrator lawyers, and they did not win the sympathy of the House. We now find two provisions in the guide, paragraphs 56 and 63, which deal with the issue.
The first point about this is that it is unnecessary for the point to be dealt with in two separate paragraphs. The two paragraphs I mentioned say exactly the same thing, and one of them is plainly in the wrong place because it is under chapter 1, which deals with directorships. Arbitrators are not directors at all of the party by whom they are nominated. They are acting as independent adjudicators on the issue before them. It should not be in paragraph 56, and if it is taken out nobody will miss it because it is repeated in exactly the same terms in paragraph 63. That is the first point. It is simply a provision which is unnecessary and should be taken out.
Paragraph 63 itself is a bit confusing because it deals with the problem of arbitrators by saying that:
“Members providing legal and arbitral services need to register the identity of registrable clients … under this category only once (a) the identity of the client or party has entered the public domain or (b) they have been paid for the work (wholly or in part), whichever comes first”.
The problem is this that point (a) seems to suggest that registration is required only where the fact that the arbitration is taking place has entered the public domain.
There is something to be said for that because, on the whole, arbitrations are meant to be private affairs and there are some cases where it is in the interests of the state that the fact that the arbitration is proceeding should not be known by the public. I had some experience of this when I advised the governor of one of our overseas territories. I declared my interest to the register, but I said that it would be unfortunate if the name of the governor or the identity of the territory were identified because there was a considerable political debate and she did not want it known that she had applied to London for advice. Very wisely, the register simply said that I had advised the governor of an overseas territory, the details of which could be provided on request. I thought that was a very sensible way of getting around my problem.
However, it comes back to the point that there are cases where there is a reason for something not entering the public domain. The problem is that the second branch of this clause states that you have to declare when you are paid, and that could happen before the public knows about the arbitration or in a case where arbitration is meant to be confidential. I am not suggesting a solution to this, but I suggest that the committee might like to look more carefully at what exactly it wants to be declared by arbitrators. I am sure we will follow the guidance. At the moment, it works reasonably well for me, and I am not complaining, but there is a lack of clarity that needs to be addressed.
On the third point—presentation—I hope I am not treading on any toes when I say that our code does not stand up very well in comparison with the House of Commons code of conduct. I am not talking about content, and I endorse what the noble Lord, Lord Forsyth, said about the differences between our two Houses. That is not my point. It is a question of presentation. Its code is much better presented than ours.
Perhaps I can put forward some basic requirements. First, the content should be divided into distinct sections under clearly labelled headings. Secondly, the contents of each section should be set out paragraph by paragraph, each of which is designed to deal with one topic only. These paragraphs should be kept short, ideally no more than about six lines, so that the point that they are making can be easily and quickly understood. People tend to speed-read when they look at documents of this kind, and they need to be able to grasp the point quickly. If a paragraph runs beyond about six lines, they will miss the point, so there needs to be brevity and clarity. It is all about presentation, and I do not think our code meets that test as well as it should. It is partly because things have been added, but as it is there is a bit of confusion.
The purpose of our code is set out in paragraph 3 under the heading “Introduction”. It would be better if it said “Purpose”. Paragraph 3 is divided into sub-paragraphs (a) and (b) which, quite correctly, set out propositions that are clear and simple, but the clarity of that original presentation is undermined—indeed, cluttered—by adding two sentences to sub-paragraph (a) which deal with the scope of the code, not its purpose. They are important sentences. The first states that
“the Code does not extend to members’ performance of duties unrelated to parliamentary proceedings, or to their private lives”,
but that deals not with the object of the code but with its scope. It should be set out in separate paragraphs, separately presented. I would keep sub-paragraphs (a) and (b) in paragraph 3, but the middle sentences should be set out in two separate paragraphs after that.
Paragraph 7 is another paragraph that needs to be broken into separate paragraphs for clarity. It talks about three different things. First, it talks about the application of the code to the Lord Speaker and the Senior Deputy Speaker, then it deals with its application to candidates for those offices, and then to the spouses or partners of officeholders. All that is bunched into a single paragraph. It would be much easier to follow if it was divided into three paragraphs, one by one.
Another one is paragraph 28, which is 17 lines long and contains six sentences. It is far too long, and it should be broken down into separate paragraphs. Paragraph 12 sets out the seven principles identified by the Committee on Standards in Public Life. That, of course, is good and helpful, but it also states that it should
“act as a guide to members in considering the requirement”
in paragraph 10
“to act always on their personal honour”.
I understand the intention to say a bit about what that time-honoured phrase means, but it is not helpful to then say, “Have a look at the standards in public life”, because not all of them relate to that. The first two are related—for example, integrity—but then it goes on to other things. There are a whole lot of things to go through.
This is my point about simplicity; if you are going to make a point, it should be pure and simple. A better way of doing it would be to refer to the passage in the guide which sets out, in paragraph 7, what the committee on standards suggested we should understand by that phrase, rather than going on to the principles. We should keep the principles as they are, but not make that cross-reference. If a reference is needed, it should be to refer to the guide.
Finally, I will make a brief comment on the question asked in the call for evidence:
“should there be a rule covering behaviour … that causes significant reputational damage to the House as a whole?”
As the noble Lord, Lord Forsyth, suggested, we move into quite dangerous territory if we try to make provision about that. The question reminds me, and I am sure many other noble Lords, of the case of Lord Sewel, whose conduct, as reported in the Sun, was clearly of that character. The problem was that the conduct took place entirely in private. As he pointed out, the code relates only to standards of conduct expected of Members in the discharge of their parliamentary duties.
It was a very anxious period. As convenor, I know well how difficult it was for our Leader, the noble Baroness, Lady Stowell, to deal with. In the end, fortunately Lord Sewel recognised that his conduct was not compatible with membership of the House and that he could serve the House’s interests best by leaving it. That solved the immediate problem, but the point remains that the code applies only to a Member’s parliamentary duties and does not extend to what they do in their private lives, however damaging that may be.
Nothing was done by altering the code at that stage, but it would have been very difficult to extend it to private lives. I am not suggesting that we should do that. However, there is a question we might like to think about. I suggest that to broaden the code to cover private lives, or professional lives outside the House, by sets of rules would be unacceptable. However, it might be sensible to contain a note of advice, advising Members that they should at all times avoid engaging in conduct likely to cause significant reputational damage to the House. It would be advice, not a rule, but it would serve as a reminder of the inescapable fact that Members need to have regard to the reputation of the House, whatever they do and wherever they are.
Lord Howard of Rising (Con)
My Lords, I add my thanks to the noble Baroness, Lady Manningham-Buller, for arranging this. I will not keep noble Lords long, but I would like to make one important point. As was mentioned by my noble friend Lord Forsyth, there was a recent newspaper report which claimed that a noble Lord had misled the House and that a child had not been allowed to run in her state school’s playground because there was insufficient space to scamper about. The noble Lord pointed out that this was because some of the school’s property had been sold to an adjoining private school.
Apparently, there has been a complaint to the House of Lords commissioners, claiming that the noble Lord’s statement was incorrect. Whether that statement is true or false, it is not the place of the Lords commissioners to have any say in what is said in a Chamber of this House. It is an issue of paramount importance that there should be complete freedom for Members of this House when speaking here to say what they will, with no outside interference of any sort. To go down the road of censoring or adjudicating speeches in the House would inevitably end up stifling free speech. We have parliamentary privilege specifically to be able to speak freely, and I would be most grateful if the noble Baroness, Lady Manningham-Buller, could clarify in her report that the Lords commissioners have no role whatever in overseeing what is said during debates in the House of Lords.
Earl Attlee (Con)
My Lords, I am grateful to the noble Baroness, the chairman of the Conduct Committee, for initiating this debate, because it gives us the opportunity to comment on the direction of travel, which I do not believe to be ideal. It is unfortunate that there are so few speakers—despite the evident quality of the speakers.
I suspect that most Members of the House think that, provided that they declare their interests and do not stick their fingers in the till, they will not experience any problems, even if they omit to carefully scrutinise our Code of Conduct—a point noted by the noble Baroness. Sadly, this is not the case, because the direction of travel hitherto has been to increase the number of possible transgressions—and she touched on the length of the code. For instance, how many noble Lords realise that it is against the Code of Conduct to pay for sex? It is not something that I intend to do, but the term is very imprecise—and the noble Baroness talked about lack of clarity. For instance, does the prohibition catch paraphilic infantilism? I hope that I have the pronunciation right. What it certainly does is to create vulnerabilities where they did not previously exist, just as homosexuality did, sadly, in the past.
In the past, Conduct Committee reports were debatable and divisible, and the House demonstrated a clear willingness to discipline Members when they had transgressed. However, in the aftermath of a highly controversial debate and Division we, wrongly I believe, decided that Conduct Committee reports would not be debatable. The case that I am referring to involved a Peer who was a leading human rights lawyer. He was my political opponent, and I was always on the other side of his argument. I am not a lawyer, I am of a different creed, and I had never socialised with him. Nevertheless, I voted in support of the amendment proposed by the noble Lord, Lord Pannick, against the conduct Motion. I did this because the report of your Lordships’ Commissioner of Standards was full of holes, in my opinion. For instance, the investigation took place more than 10 years after the events in question; no documentary evidence was available, as there would be in a paid advocacy issue; and the commissioner interviewed witnesses by telephone about crucial telephone conversations that had taken place 10 years earlier.
All the other conduct reports that I have ever read made a cast-iron, open and shut case. In a recent case, one noble Lord became intoxicated and, regrettably, abused other pass-holders, resulting in an official complaint to your Lordships’ Commissioner for Standards. The noble Lord made a sincere offer to meet the victims as part of a reconciliation process, and I am confident that, if that meeting had taken place, there would have been reconciliation. Regrettably, the victims declined that offer, as was their absolute right. No doubt the Commissioner for Standards took this into consideration when recommending one week’s suspension. However, your Lordships’ Conduct Committee decided to treble the sanction, safe in the knowledge that it would not be challengeable in debate.
Some issues that are drawn to our attention require considerable moral courage to address. For instance, right now, I am dealing with the systemic harassment of the heavy haulage industry by a few police forces, but I am not getting very far despite the risks I am taking in taking on the police. In the last few Parliaments, I attempted to get Section 40 of the Crime and Courts Act, better known as the Leveson reforms, commenced. This was not some niche issue as, in the past, I had won a Division against my own party when in government—in other words, a majority of the House was with me. At the time, one noble Lord privately suggested to me that I was brave to take on the press. I gently pointed out that I knew I had no skeletons in the cupboard. I must note that few other Peers would engage the press in the way that I and the noble Baroness, Lady Hollins, did. Only one Conservative MP would even discuss the matter with me; that was the late Sir David Amess.
At the very end of the previous Parliament, the media Bill provided one final opportunity to get the carrot component of Section 40 retained, while the stick component would be repealed in line with the Government’s manifesto commitment. I tabled a suitable amendment and was working up my speaking notes and arguments when I glanced at the Conduct Committee’s proposal to make a transgression of the Code of Conduct be considered as bringing the House “into disrepute”, or words to that effect; in essence, that means how much adverse publicity the Peer in question has generated. I must tell the Committee that all my moral courage evaporated immediately. I immediately withdrew my amendment and persuaded the clerk to take it off the Marshalled List, even though I was technically too late. I confess that I left the noble Baroness, Lady Hollins, to move her amendment in Committee on her own. It was a complete lack of moral courage on my part.
I did have some powerful new arguments about why IPSO was not fit for purpose. As it happened, the advent of the election and procedural issues put me in a strong position, so I ran a Report stage amendment but without the benefit of having made a detailed argument in Committee. In the end, I was unsuccessful. I must tell the Committee that I am not confident that, if my conduct had been called into question, I would have been dealt with fairly. My noble friend Lord Forsyth just talked about the position of the noble Lord, Lord Alli. A major reason for this lack of confidence is the inability to defend myself, or to have someone defend me in front of the whole House, before the House decides on the matter.
I intend to retire next year, despite being two years short of the average age of the House of Lords. I can assure the Committee that only 10% or 15% of this decision is due to the issues we are discussing today; most of it is due to demotivation caused by constant and unfair criticism of your Lordships’ House, which the House authorities appear to do nothing to counteract. Nevertheless, this issue is a factor.
Lord Evans of Weardale (CB)
My Lords, I am grateful for the opportunity to contribute to this debate. I should declare that I am the former chair of the Committee on Standards in Public Life.
The Committee on Standards in Public Life is the custodian, so to speak, of the Nolan principles—the Seven Principles of Public Life—to which the noble Baronesses, Lady Donaghy and Lady Manningham-Buller, have already referred. When Lord Nolan drew up his seminal report on public standards, he envisaged that the principles would stand at the apex of the system but would not stand alone and would not be justiciable. He envisaged that there would also be two other key parts: first, codes of conduct, which we are discussing today, in order to read down those overarching principles into the particular circumstances of different institutions; and, secondly, training and an opportunity for people to learn and consider what standards meant in their particular environments. It seems to me that that model of how standards should operate has stood the test of time.
One of the privileges of being in that job as chairman of the Committee on Standards in Public Life is that one got exposure to a very large number of different organisations and the way they approach these problems. We took evidence from government, Parliament, the private sector, charities and other organisations. Of course, the issues are different in different parts of the system, although one of the things that I was struck by was that the seven principles seemed to command considerable support even, for instance, from people in the corporate sector. They took notice of them and an interest in them and in how we applied them in public life, so we have something there that we can be proud of. I was also struck that quite often there would be delegations from a variety of countries coming to talk to the UK about the way in which standards issues were managed here. You might say from a purely UK perspective that that was slightly surprising if you read the papers at the time that I was chairman. Respect for public standards was not the most evident aspect of what was going on, but nevertheless we have traditionally had quite a strong reputation in this area.
Of all the areas that we looked at, the most difficult was Parliament. I say that for two reasons. The first is the immense complexity of the arrangements in Parliament at both ends, and of the systems, some of which are specific to particular Houses, some of which are common across Parliament. The interplay between them takes a considerable amount of detailed work to understand. I remember spending a lot of time talking to all the relevant stakeholders to try to work out how the bullying aspects, the conduct aspects and so on relate to each other, so I strongly support the suggestion that there should be greater clarity. However, I do not underestimate how difficult it is to achieve that clarity, partly because it is much easier in an environment in which everybody is an employee and you can set a policy and say that if you do not like it, you can leave. That does not apply in political life or in your Lordships’ House.
The Code of Conduct in the Lords in some ways bears even more weight and does more work than is the case in the Commons. The reason I say that is that ultimately in the Commons there is a political price to pay for individuals who breach public standards. Partygate and the many other scandals that we saw over recent years led in due course to a political price, but Members of your Lordships’ House do not have that electoral jeopardy if they breach standards in a way that the public would find unacceptable. Therefore, it is particularly important that the Code of Conduct here should be as effective as it possibly can be. It is also particularly complicated because of the fact that Members of the House are not on a salary, and in that sense what is and is not acceptable in terms of payment for various aspects of individuals’ lives is difficult, and some of the complexities in the Code of Conduct reflect that. I suspect that, looked at from the outside, most people in the street would find the system perplexing. Certainly, the postbag that I used to receive when I was in that role suggested quite low levels of confidence that standards were being appropriately upheld in Parliament—probably more critical than the reality, so there is an issue of reputation and an issue of credibility that is an important part of the work that is currently in hand in the Conduct Committee.
Certainly, from my perspective, the Code of Conduct needs to do two things. It needs appropriately to regulate the business of the House so that we can be confident in the integrity of the way in which Members approach their responsibilities in the House, but it also needs to protect the House’s reputation and project the integrity of the House to a very sceptical public. Without that, our role, and the role of the House in general, is undermined.
Against that background—I have submitted specific evidence in writing—I highlight two things. The first is that I support a clause that suggests that anybody who undermines the reputation of the House is breaching the Code of Conduct. I recognise that there are those who feel that that is overreach, and I hear that, but it is completely normal in many environments for that to be included. If you look at the way in which the professional bodies look at their responsibilities today in the regulated professions, the question of who is a fit and proper person is taken into consideration.
I declare an interest as a member of the board of the KPMG Anglo-Swiss partnership. The regulator for audit looks at the way in which audit is done but also takes at least a glance at whether individual auditors are fit and proper people to take on that trusted role as an auditor. I find it difficult to understand why we would not expect a similar approach to those who are taking on the trusted role as a member of a parliamentary body. I believe that there should be a clause in respect of reputation, and that in doing so, we are not over- reaching; we are doing what is actually quite widespread in many organisations. If you looked at the concerns that certainly I have seen expressed about Parliament, you would see that people do not understand why things are so different now. In many ways they need to be different, but in a number of other ways they are different without needing to be so.
I have a second suggestion. I realise that in suggesting this I am tilting at windmills, but I will tilt anyway. I personally believe that—
Lord Forsyth of Drumlean (Con)
On this point about the reputation of Parliament, which is obviously very important, what is the noble Lord’s view on former chairmen of the Committee on Standards in Public Life who appear regularly in the media to provide a commentary about how dreadful standards are? Is that not far more damaging than anything any individual would do?
Lord Evans of Weardale (CB)
I do not want to comment on my predecessors in the role, but I point out that I have not appeared myself in the media to comment on that, despite many invitations. Rather similarly to the people who run the security service, it is probably better to shut up and go. Although predecessors in the committee take their own judgments on these things, it does not seem to me that opining on matters about which you have no current knowledge is necessarily a wise approach. But that is a matter for myself.
My second point, my windmill, was that I personally do not think that the phrase “acting upon personal honour” is very helpful. As the noble Lord, Lord Forsyth, said, things have changed a bit. Although we in the House of Lords understand what we mean by that, almost anybody looking at it from the outside would roll their eyes and say, “What on earth is that about?” I realise that we have definitions which are derived from it, all of which I think I support. Nevertheless, the use of the phrase, despite the fact that it is time-hallowed, is difficult reputationally to present. It suggests an approach to standards which is not actually the one that we see. There has been very considerable progress on the way in which standards issues are tackled in your Lordships’ House, but I do not think that that is the way in which it would be perceived through use of language which I think would be widely misunderstood.
Baroness Fox of Buckley (Non-Afl)
My Lords, I too thank the noble Baroness, Lady Manningham-Buller, for this discussion. I share a lot of the concerns already raised, especially those from the noble Lord, Lord Forsyth of Drumlean, because I have a dread of mission creep. Like the noble and learned Lord, Lord Hope of Craighead, I will look at some of the specific wording in the code, because I have read it several times and will raise some things that worry me.
I encourage one aim of the review—that is, to shorten the code. At present, there seems to be an overly complicated deluge of details on rules that, dangerously, threaten to drown out the general principles around standards that we are so concerned about—the very standards that the noble Lord, Lord Evans, has just indicated are so important. We have to be able to see them very clearly. At present, the problem is that the rules are all you can see.
There is also a danger of turning the code into a counterproductive box-ticking exercise, if it is dominated by rules in this way. It means that you can feel virtuous obeying the letter of the rules rather than believing in or having any feel for their spirit. We have seen over recent weeks with the “glasses for passes” or Taylor Swift ticket sagas and so on that the “We are acting according to the rules” defence does not engender public trust, regardless of whether it was within the rules.
My main reason for wanting to speak today is that my interests and knowledge are in relation to how, in broader society, straightforward do’s and don’ts about, for example, professional conflicts of interest have gradually seeped into the more subjective and intimate spheres of interpersonal relations and the problems that can create. The devil is often in the detail, and later I shall raise questions around problematic parts of the small-print definitions of bullying and harassment. But there is actually an absence of detail in the part of the code that is mandatory for all noble Lords. The code demands attendance at seminars designed
“to raise awareness of, and to prevent, bullying, harassment and sexual misconduct”.
Yet there is no detail about the contents of these compulsory sessions. How can we debate their effectiveness here without being able to scrutinise what they say? That is hardly transparent. These compulsory seminars have created headlines in the last couple of years when various high-profile noble Lords were disciplined—indeed, named and shamed—for non-attendance. But I challenge the value of these courses per se.
I raise this with some trepidation, because the implicit accusation lurks in the code that not taking these courses somehow implies that you are not taking bullying or harassment seriously. Yet these sorts of training modules, which are ubiquitous throughout the public sector and of notoriously mixed quality, can be politically contentious, deploying the worst and most divisive EDI stereotypes and using an insultingly patronising and hectoring tone. Worse, they act as a form of compelled speech. You have to nod along and give the correct answers to prove that you are not guilty of harbouring some dodgy or malign attitudes. Why are there compulsory seminars only for these behaviours? Why not have courses on financial propriety or the correct use of political donations? Given the mission creep front, I am not suggesting that, of course. Yet somehow, bullying, harassment and sexual harassment are treated as especially grievous.
The backdrop to some of my reservations over the part of the code relating especially to bullying and harassment is the way that, over the last 20 years or so, interpersonal relations in the workplace have become politicised while, conversely, the ordinary conflicts of public life, such as political disagreements, are being conducted in personal terms. Politics has become personal in the worst possible way. What is more, the accusation that a public figure has behaved inappropriately towards another person can exact a far greater price than any amount of corruption. That alone means that it can be too easily weaponised.
I first encountered this a couple of decades ago when I cut my teeth as a trade union rep at an FE college. Shortly after management added bullying to its disciplinary procedures, there was a spate of complaints. I represented two members of staff, one of whom was accused by an incompetent fellow member of staff and the other by a student who struggled academically. Both, as it turned out, were victims of false allegations and were eventually totally exonerated, but the process dragged on for months. At the end of it all, one of the accused took early retirement and, after an exemplary 30 years as a lecturer, was left feeling bitter and betrayed. The other had a nervous breakdown.
I learned then that, often, the process is the punishment. I have tracked similarly destructive ways in which anti-bullying and harassment codes have spread in universities, as well as how they are often used by activists to cancel speakers and hound and silence lecturers whose so-called toxic views are deemed bullying by some students.
Only recently, closer to home, the Equality and Human Rights Commission eventually closed the case against the noble Baroness, Lady Falkner of Margravine, after many hellish months. She was being investigated because EHRC employees filed bullying complaints that seem to have been ideologically motivated because of her completely correct stance, as chair of the EHRC, in clarifying the protection of biological women’s rights.
One reason we see such cases is that the charge of bullying can be used as a political weapon in a witch hunt to discredit opponents, since the definitions of bullying are so nebulous and subjective. This is even admitted in the code’s appendix, which details these definitions:
“Bullying may be characterised as offensive … behaviour … that can make a person feel vulnerable, upset, undermined”,
et cetera. We are told:
“Whether conduct constitutes bullying will depend on … the perception of the person experiencing the conduct”.
Perhaps less cynically, the data shows that, once anti-bullying procedures are formalised by an organisation, claims of victimisation inevitably grow. That is hardly surprising; increasing prevalence may be less a response to actual behaviour and more about people’s changing interpretation of that behaviour.
Much of what is listed in the code seems almost to incite complaints about minor incidents. Under bullying, we have “being sarcastic”—I mean, what? I have just done it. It also lists using “inappropriate nicknames” and “practical jokes”. We are told that bullying can be verbal or non-verbal,
“may be persistent or an isolated incident and may manifest obviously or be hidden or insidious”.
That is a very wide brief. Can the committee explain how such vast parameters will not encourage trivial complaints? What procedures exist—
Lord Forsyth of Drumlean (Con)
I think I am right in saying that, in the case of bullying, the identity of the complainant is kept from the person being complained about, which makes this even more egregious.
Baroness Fox of Buckley (Non-Afl)
It just gets worse and worse; that is all I can say. I want to know what procedures exist, or will exist, in any review to avoid vexatious complaints. How will the use of accusations, either in pursuit of vendettas or due simply to misinterpreting harmless personality clashes, be dealt with? Who decides what is actionable, and using what criteria?
The definition of harassment in the code is arguably even more troubling. We are told that harassment
“can be intentional or unintentional”
and, again, that it depends on perception. There are some extraordinary quotes; I urge noble Lords to read them because they are frightening. It says:
“A person may … be harassed even if they were not the intended ‘target’”.
The example that made me gulp was that
“a person may be harassed by jokes about a religious group that they do not belong to”.
What on earth censorious identitarian doors does that open? Then there is—wait for it—this example: “Deliberately”—I do not know who decides on that—
“holding meetings or social events in a location that is not accessible for an individual … by reason of religious prohibitions”.
So, a get-together in a bar, which some practising Muslims will not want to attend, could be seen as harassment; that is the word used.
Finally, the code refers to the use of “unacceptable or inappropriate language”—again, who decides what is unacceptable or inappropriate?—
“or racial or other stereotypes (regardless of whether the complainant is in fact a member of the group stereotyped)”.
Is this harassment? It insults the victims of proper harassment to say that. Using a recent controversy, perhaps I can claim harassment here. I heard one noble Baroness call a member of the public a “coconut”, which I consider a racial slur. Well, it does not affect me, but I heard it. I am harassed, am I? I am certainly offended, but let me assure noble Lords that I do not need a code to say that; I will just argue back instead.
It is a mistake to encourage people to police their conduct or language using an ever-prescriptive code. If anyone actually read this code and took it literally, or if it was heavily enforced, it would stifle frank and open debate and undermine us holding each other to account in public. Two of the seven Nolan principles denoting standards in public life are openness and honesty. What gives us the ability to be honest and open is not a bureaucratic code but an unapologetic commitment to free speech, so I am glad to see on page 6 of the code—I hope this will stay and be highlighted even more—a recognition of the primary consideration of the principle of free speech in parliamentary proceedings to allow Members to express their views fully and frankly. Hear, hear to that.
I wonder how we all feel about a rather disappointing letter, not directly to do with the code but part of mission creep, that we were sent by the Chief Whips across all the parties in which we were asked to mind our language. At the start of the new term on 2 September, we were asked to ensure
“debate that does not descend into vitriol … or use of rhetoric designed to offend and inflame”.
I find that chilling, perhaps because I wrote a book entitled I Find That Offensive. I know that attempts to purge so-called offensive speech can be a less than subtle code for telling people “You can’t say that”. I want us to avoid reducing political rhetoric to carefully manicured, rehearsed lines from a sanitised script and instead stand up for what we believe to be right with passion and plain speaking. If that sounds vitriolic, so be it. To be honest, there are so many challenges in national and international politics at present that deserve our vitriol that maybe saying it out loud is the mark of honourable public service, far more evidently than following any code of conduct, which, broadly speaking, I would cut, cut and cut again.
Lord Balfe (Con)
My Lords, I add my thanks to the noble Baroness, Lady Manningham-Buller, for initiating this debate. We have just heard an excellent presentation from someone who should be the next chair of the committee.
I was for 10 years a member of the European Parliament’s house administration committee. We looked after the administration of Parliament—no politics, but lots of administration. We did not have a lot of time to keep on looking at complaints. Although we did, that was a very subsidiary part of our job. My first concern about this committee is that it exists at all, that we have four independent experts and five Members of the House as, basically, a voluntary police force. I am not sure we need it. It should be part of a general committee looking at the administration of the House, the way Members are treated and what we get. We might then get some of the few demands that we make attended to—at the moment, after 11 years in this House, I still do not know how on earth to get some quite simple things done.
I think my noble friend Lord Forsyth mentioned the declarations of our interests that we make in the Chamber. Frankly, saying “I draw attention to my interests in the register” is absolutely meaningless. People look at me and think, “Balfe is on about his engineering unions”, but I bet they do not know them. We need to look at how we present that. Do we need to get up every time? Do we do it at the beginning of a speech that is nothing to with those interests, or somewhere else? There is no real guidance about it.
The second point I will make is that it was said that the House of Commons has a better set of rules than we have. Well, they have certainly got themselves in a bit of a mess at the moment with, “My clothes were within the rules” and, “These glasses are from Specsavers”. Perhaps I could introduce someone down the Corridor to the virtues of Specsavers. What went on, which was supposedly within the rules, is certainly not in the spirit of what is acceptable to the general public, and that is what really matters. My view—I say sorry to the noble Baroness, Lady Manningham-Buller—is that this committee has gradually had mission creep and is now busy looking for things to do. I think the best thing it could do is to amalgamate itself with the House’s administration committee.
I will give one example, which is to do not with the committee but with what has been mentioned: reputational damage. Those who know me will know that I have my own definition of what should constitute foreign and defence policy. It is quite a respectable definition, but it is not supported by any political party in this House. It led me—because I believe the Russian Federation is part of Europe—to attend a function at the Russian Federation embassy. I have warm words to say about the Russian ambassador; I think he is a nice chap. I have served in the Foreign Office and know how difficult it is to go abroad to lie for your country—that, of course, is what most ambassadors have to do. That visit drew the attention of the Sunday Times, which put me and my good friend, the noble Lord, Lord Skidelsky, who sits next to me, on its front page.
I got into the House on the Monday, as I normally usually do, and received a telephone call saying that the Chief Whip would like me to see her. I went to see the Chief Whip, who rather sheepishly led me into the office of the Leader. The Leader, the noble Lord, Lord True, said “I have received a complaint that you are doing reputational damage to this House by going to the Russian embassy”. I said, “Oh, really?”. He said, “I could withdraw the whip”. I said, “That would be very good. It would really go down well in Moscow if you were to withdraw the whip from me for going to the Russian embassy to a national day reception, together with the high commissioners of India, Pakistan and Sri Lanka and lots of European ambassadors. Maybe you could ask for them to be sent home and withdraw their accreditation?”. Of course, the Leader being sensible, he said that he did not say that he would withdraw the whip, but that he could. That was the last I heard of it. I will oppose anything that tries to bring a concept such as reputational damage into our rules because what is one person’s reputational damage is another person’s legitimate political expression of belief. I think that is very important.
Before I sit down, I want to mention two particular cases that have concerned me. One is my good friend the noble Lord, Lord Maginnis, who was sentenced—for want of a better word—before the noble Baroness, Lady Manningham-Buller, was chair of this committee. Ken is well over 80. He is—I think I will say—a curmudgeon, but a very nice one. He came over one night from Belfast, and he had mislaid his pass. He was shot during the Troubles, and he has suffered for many years from severe pains in his leg. His leg was hurting badly. He got to the barrier, and he ended up in a dispute—I put it no higher than that—with the man behind the glass box. We all know the way in from Westminster tube station. A noble Lord tried to sort it out, but it got into a confrontation. It was reported to the committee. Ken was suspended for six months, I think, and he was told that he had to go on a course to make him racially aware, or some such thing, and he refused to go on it. He still has not been on it, and he has not been back to this House because it was made a condition. Frankly, I think that was totally over the top.
My next case is that of the noble Lord, Lord Ranger, who had a few too many, shall was say, and instead of choosing the Red Lion, chose the bar in the House of Commons in which to fall out with a member of staff. Had he chosen the Red Lion at the bottom of Whitehall, nothing could have been done, because the Conduct Committee’s remit, as far as I know, does not run as far as the Red Lion. None the less, as has been mentioned, the noble Lord, Lord Ranger, was sentenced to a week’s suspension, which miraculously turned into three weeks and, which has not been mentioned, a year’s ban on ordering alcohol in the House. This is totally over the top.
Both those cases demonstrate—and nowhere in the report is it mentioned—not even a shred of compassion or understanding. By all means know the Nolan rules and be able to recite them in your sleep, but if we do not know how to treat people with compassion—and both these cases showed that—we are failing, and we are failing considerably. No one said to Ken, “Look, old boy, we realise you were a bit over the top, but”—this is what I would have done in the European Parliament—“I’m going to arrange a meeting between the two of you. You know you were over the top and you have got to apologise”. Ken told me that he would have apologised if he had been able to. We have to look more at the human compassion that is needed to run an organisation like this. You cannot run it on the basis of a set of rules. I am terribly sorry, but it is not the way you run an organisation of human beings with human foibles.
I have read these rules thoroughly, and I will be quite honest: I stay away from the staff. Apart from with Simon Burton, I make it a point not to engage with any of the staff in this place beyond the absolute minimum necessary because I do not want to be landed with some sort of complaint. I am not a particularly bad-tempered person, or anything; I am just a careful person. Part of the fault of the rules is that it is ruining the interaction within the building itself.
The final point I shall make is that it is totally unacceptable to have reports that we cannot debate or question. Even if it has to be in a private committee room, such as this, without minutes, there should be an opportunity for these reports to be questioned and to be justified. It is absolutely unacceptable that we can have something worse than a Star Chamber because at least the Star Chamber goes to the Cabinet. What we have is a group of people, four out of the nine of whom are not even Members of this House, who can pass sentences which ruin and wreck people’s careers. That is not acceptable, and we need some very fundamental reform.
Lord Skidelsky (CB)
My Lords, in taking part in this debate, I must declare an interest: recently, I was a victim of the committee chaired by the noble Baroness, Lady Manningham-Buller. Although this is not the kind of interest a Member is normally obliged to declare, I believe that my personal experience has given me a certain insight into the way the system works, which may be of public interest.
I welcome the committee’s aim to shorten and clarify the code and guide wherever possible—they require drastic pruning—but, because their expansion is part of a more general demand for increased transparency in public life, it is very hard to know how and where to stand out against the tide; one then sort of looks rather like King Canute. That is a problem the committee must face.
When I was made a Peer in 1991, there was no register of interests, Code of Conduct or daily attendance allowance. New Peers were given a brochure telling them not to be vexatious in speaking—I have tried to stick to that faithfully—but that was about it. The custom, which continues to this day, was that Lords with a pecuniary interest in the subject under discussion should declare an interest.
In 1996, that was extended to non-pecuniary interests. I have done a bit of research on this. Had I taken part in a debate on crossbows in 1996, I might have had to declare my interest as chairman of the crossbow association, whether I was paid or not. In fact, this example is not entirely fanciful because there was a debate on crossbows in the early 1990s; I did not take part in it, but that was the kind of interest you were supposed to declare. Unlike MPs, Lords received no pay. They could claim actual expenses incurred for attending Parliament.
This relaxed system started to unravel in the 1990s. A register was created in 1996 to “restore confidence” in parliamentary institutions even though it was MPs, not Peers, who were involved in the “cash for questions” scandal. That register was not particularly intrusive: Lords were required to register their interests under two compulsory registrable categories, one covering paid consultations for providing parliamentary services and the second covering any financial interest in businesses involved in parliamentary lobbying. Registration under category 3, which included all other interests, was voluntary. About 10 Lords registered their interests under the first two compulsory categories. Some 308 Lords registered interests under the third, voluntary, discretionary category, while 208 Peers had failed to register any interest whatever. In an attitude of lordly disdain, Lord Jenkins of Hillhead registered his discretionary interests as:
“Chancellor of the University of Oxford (unpaid) … President of the Royal Society of Literature (unpaid) … Writer of books and articles … Occasional lecturer … mostly but not invariably unpaid”.
Then came the Williams report in 2000, which really started the regulatory escalator. There was now to be a short Code of Conduct built on seven principles, which, by virtue of repeated incantation, have come to be regarded as sacred: selflessness, integrity, objectivity, accountability, openness, honesty, and leadership. No one can be against these virtues, but they do not do any work in the code. They are vestiges of a pre-code attitude to behaviour that has somehow survived into this world of contractual obligation.
More importantly, the number of registrable interests shot up from two to 10. In effect, discretion as to what or what not to register was abolished. Peers who aspired to be legislators could no longer decline to register their interests. As a direct result of the new requirement, eminent hereditary Peers such as Lord Cranborne resigned their membership of the House.
The next flurry of reform followed the parliamentary expenses and “cash for amendments” scandals of 2009, which involved both Peers and MPs. As a result, the expenses claim system was turned into one of attendance allowances and the Code of Conduct was expanded. There was a new independent commissioner for standards and an explicit sanctions regime was introduced, allowing for expulsion or suspension.
That was not the end of it. The 2010 code was extended to Members’ staff on 1 April 2019, while a new section covering bullying, harassment and sexual misconduct was added to the code in April 2021. At the end of this process, noble Lords could no longer be trusted on their honour to behave decently in matters, either monetary or sexual affairs; they must sign a contract promising to do so.
As has rightly been said, there has been a huge mission creep since the 1990s. Some detail of that makes it a bit more vivid. The register, which started with 59 pages, two registrable categories and one discretionary category in 1996, now has 10 mandatory categories and 414 pages. This partly reflects an increase in numbers, of course, but, much more importantly, it reflects the incentive to register an interest in almost anything for fear of being sanctioned for missing something. Among the monumental collections of interests that it has been my privilege to look at, one Peer has listed no fewer than 200 relevant interests—I counted. It is impossible to say whether he was being boastful or merely prudent.
The code and guide have expanded from 137 paragraphs and 27 pages in 2009 to 262 paragraphs—including appendices—and 57 pages in 2023. The enforcement procedure alone now comes to 79 paragraphs and 15 pages. Although the ritual appeal to Lords’ honour continues throughout all this, honour has been completely devalued. In fact, in an extraordinary passage, the Committee on Privileges says that
“any definition of ‘personal honour’ … would quickly become out-moded”—
that is, personal honour is simply what is expected today: a contractual promise to do what present opinion decrees to be honourable. So much for Edmund Burke. But the phrase should be dropped, perhaps because it has stopped having any relevance to the code. In the same period, from 2010 to today, the daily attendance allowance has dropped by 50% in real terms—that is, the cost of membership of the House has risen relative to the rewards for membership.
I come to the last set of things I want to say. How do we explain this regulatory explosion? What, if anything, can be done to stop it or even reverse it, as a number of noble Lords have suggested? I suggest that one source of the explosion arises from a defect of language. “Interest” is always defined in terms of private benefit or profit. This sets up an automatic conflict or potential conflict between interest and duty. The older idea that it is in the legislator’s interest to secure good government has gone and interest has become something completely apart from duty. In that confusion lies a lot of what has gone wrong in the expansion of the code.
The second source of regulatory creep is the importance given in your Lordships’ reports to public perception. This has been mentioned a number of times. Again and again, it is stated not that noble Lords should act honourably but that they should be perceived to act honourably. Perceived by whom? Typical is this from the current code:
“The key consideration in determining relevance … is that the interest might be thought by a reasonable member of the public to influence the way in which a member of the House … discharges his or her parliamentary duties”.
The code says that a reasonable member of the public is taken to mean
“an impartial and well informed person, who judges all the relevant facts in an objective manner”.
Where is this individual to be found? Maybe only on the judicial Bench.
Beneath the stately prose, one can detect a succession of capitulations to two pressures: on the one hand to journalists, who make their living by snooping and entrapment; and on the other to lawyers, who aim to construct cast-iron defences against any possible allegation of skulduggery. These objects, which I completely understand, have only a remote connection with securing public accountability for Members’ actions. Again, the word “public” needs clarification.
I would like the committee, first, to go back to the original purpose of no paid advocacy and ask whether the vast regulatory superstructure now in place is needed to achieve it. How many registrable interests are relevant to the issue of corruption? Is it really necessary for Peers to record all their journalistic outpourings? Some are more prolific than others in this respect, but what relevance does that have to their parliamentary duties? Secondly, I suggest the mechanical rule that any addition to the register should be matched by a subtraction. Thirdly, I would remove the demeaning requirement that Peers attend behavioural seminars. You may need these for children or possibly university students, but not for adults who are determined mature enough to be legislators, as the noble Baroness, Lady Fox, touched on. Either make them real and show up their absurdity, or abolish them. Finally, any Member of the House sanctioned by the Conduct Committee should have a right to test the opinion of the House. We should not be condemned in camera. I beg the committee to set its face against using hammers to crack a small collection of nuts.
Baroness Noakes (Con)
My Lords, it is a pleasure to follow the noble Lord, Lord Skidelsky. Unfortunately, he has stolen some of my thunder, as I was going to go through some of the history of the evolution of the Code of Conduct. I will cover a little of it but will attempt not to repeat what he said.
I welcome this debate, but it is sad that only 12 noble Lords have opted to take part, although perhaps encouraging that others have stayed to listen. It would have been better to see greater involvement.
Baroness Manningham-Buller (CB)
Quite a lot of Peers, not all of them here today, have put in written submissions and have been doing so since spring. If noble Lords chose not to come today or preferred the very interesting things happening next door, it may be because they have already sent us a note, of which we have had quite a few.
Baroness Noakes (Con)
I accept that point. The choice of the Government to put the debate in this Room may well have affected the willingness of noble Lords to take part, because putting it here usually says “not so important” to noble Lords.
The code has become a monster and we need to do something about it. Like the noble Lord, Lord Skidelsky, when I joined the House there was no Code of Conduct. We managed perfectly well with the rather minimal rules of declaration of interests and very light-touch registration of interests. We had the two foundational principles that Peers should always act on their personal honour and should never accept any financial inducement for exercising parliamentary influence. That served us well.
I had not been in the House very long before we acquired our first Code of Conduct. We got it back in 2000 because the Committee on Standards in Public Life decided to have a look at whether the House of Lords should have a code of conduct. It fully accepted that there was no scandal or issue leading to the suggestion that we needed one, but nevertheless recommended that we have one. The rationale, so far as one was given, appeared to be that, because other legislators and organisations had codes of conduct, we should have one too. That, as far as I can see, is the only reason why we started to have one.
As the noble Lord, Lord Skidelsky, reminded us, in the wake of the “cash for amendments” scandal and, in timing terms, in alignment with the MPs’ expenses scandal, it was decided that something more should be done. It is said that hard cases make bad law. I must say, I think that media-based scandals make rotten rules; that is one reason we have got stuck with a Code of Conduct that does not seem to work for a lot of people.
We got to 2010, and we had those scandals. We had the feeling that we had to show public penance—that is, we had to wear hair shirts and do things. Self-regulation, which is a defining principle of the way in which we run our affairs in this House, partially went out the window when we started to get outsiders in, first in relation to the Commissioner for Standards then later in relation to the Conduct Committee. I regret that we went down that route because I could see no necessity for it.
I turn to the code. When the Committee on Standards in Public Life decided that we should have one, it said that it needed to be only a short code, which I think was probably a recognition that we did not really need one at all. I have not been able to track down a digital or physical copy of that first code, so I do not know how long it was, but it was certainly shorter than the version that appeared in 2010; the noble Baroness, Lady Manningham-Buller, said that that one was 28 pages. The earlier one was certainly shorter because, looking at the debates around the time of the 2010 revision, there was a great desire from people to show that they were doing things—that they had to have more rules, more penalties and, ultimately, more pages. We now have a code that is double that length; it particularly grew when the behaviour code and the infamous appendix B was added.
It should also be said that 2010 was the time when all noble Lords were compulsorily obliged to waste their time and taxpayers’ money on the completely useless course on the behaviour code. I agree with what the noble Baroness, Lady Fox, and the noble Lord, Lord Skidelsky, said about this. There should be no reason for any compulsion; I include in that the requirement for new Peers to attend the course.
The two foundational principles remain valid and cover everything that is relevant. We should question whether these 56 pages add to or detract from those principles. My own view is that the usefulness of the code in guiding Members’ behaviour is inversely related to its length. The mass of detail in the code conceals the underlying principles, in effect; I do not think that it enhances the effectiveness of the code to have so much detail in it. I encourage the committee to go back to basics when looking at revising the code. It should not be just a question of making small amendments here and there; it should be about going back to asking what we absolutely need to put in it and what can be relegated somewhere else or dealt with in another way.
When God gave Moses the 10 commandments, they were written on two tablets. In modern day parlance, I think that is roughly equivalent to one side of A4. Moses did not think that it was necessary to add any more tablets, another 50 or 100, of detailed rules to underpin the 10 commandments. The 10 commandments have endured and are well understood, but I am not sure that the same can be said of the Code of Conduct. I hope that the committee will take as a style guide the conciseness with which the 10 commandments are expressed and the lack of need to embellish them with unnecessary detail.
In addition to focusing the code back more clearly on its roots, and the focus on the underlying principles, I hope that the committee will look at whether material not directly related to the Code of Conduct can be removed. I am not at all clear why the Code of Conduct for Members includes a Code of Conduct for Members’ staff. That could be dealt with elsewhere, in a way that is accessible to Members’ staff. That is only three pages—but there are 14 or 15 pages about enforcement. I query whether a document intending to deal with the Code of Conduct should have in it detailed rules about how complaints are dealt with. That is a separate issue from the Code of Conduct and can be safely put in another document.
I can just about live with the page of motherhood and apple pie of the behaviour code in the first appendix, but the extraordinary detail in appendix B, which we heard about from the noble Baroness, Lady Fox, is certainly not necessary to Members of this House and exposes this House to ridicule. There is one good place to put the five pages of appendix B, and it is not at the back of the Code of Conduct.
I shall focus my remarks primarily on the issue of the broad approach to the code—that is, that it should be more principles based and less detail based, focused on essentials. I would like to cover some specific additional aspects. First, I very much regret the fact that the rules introduced about declaring earnings from clients that are foreign Governments led to several noble Lords taking leave of absence. Those of us who had careers in professions that regard client confidentiality as sacrosanct were frankly appalled by them. I am not convinced that the benefit of those rules stands up to scrutiny; they are certainly worth revisiting.
Secondly, I do not think that the rules that govern how the commissioner handles complaints meet the rules of natural justice that the Code of Conduct itself requires. The commissioner is the investigating policeman and the prosecutor but also the judge and jury. The accused Member does not have effective legal representation in the sense that he does not have a person who is able to put a case for the Member.
All that is justified on the basis that the proceedings are inquisitorial rather than adversarial in nature. I have talked to several noble Lords who have been caught up in the process of having a complaint against them. Whether they are guilty or not, I do not think that they share that analysis—that it is a mere inquisitorial process. They all find it extremely stressful; it goes on for a very long time, and many still bear the scars a long time after the process has completed. Lives have certainly been ruined by judgments being reached on the balance of probabilities. We really need to look again very carefully at the procedure for handling complaints.
Lastly, although it is not my final concern with the rules—but I have rationed myself to three for the purposes of today’s debate—I very strongly believe that we should not extend our code to activities outside Parliament. The requirement to act on personal honour effectively covers egregious matters that can bring the House into disrepute. The most egregious examples have been effectively dealt with by the House without formally extending the rules into private activity. I am absolutely clear that we must not open the floodgates to vexatious complaints based on private beliefs and private activities.
Baroness Barker (LD)
My Lords, my reason for taking part in the debate today is that over the past three or four decades in my professional life, which was in the charity sector, I had experience of advising complainants who believed that they had been subject to inappropriate behaviour or abuse. I advised defendants who were accused of such activities, and I have also advised boards of trustees who had before them both those groups of people and had to implement grievance and disciplinary processes to come to a judgment. Ever since I started to do that more than 30 years ago, I noted the toll it took on everybody involved, not least those whose professional lives were in jeopardy. I have been interested to watch that process happen in different organisations in different sectors—in the public sector and in the private sector too. It is one of those things where, when something occurs that you hear about on the news, you find yourself listening to it and going back to the sorts of questions that you had to deal with many years ago.
I was interested in what the noble Lord, Lord Evans of Weardale, said about issues being different in different organisations. I do not think they are. The issues are always much the same. The details and the context may well be very different and have a very different bearing on the judgment that people make. What is considered to be bringing one organisation into disrepute is very different from what brings another one into disrepute. His point about the role of professional codes of conduct was important. I observe that we do not have a professional code of conduct in this House. We rely on, in the current wording, our “personal honour”. I will turn to that in a minute.
My experience in all the cases I was involved in led me to a clear belief that what is needed in any organisation is a system that is robust, that can investigate matters as and they arise to resolve matters so that everyone can work in the organisation without fear and to their full potential, and that is timely and clearly understood. It is important that it is there before an issue arises and is not hurriedly cobbled together as an issue arises. Most complaints and grievance processes, which is what this essentially is, evolve over time. I therefore think that it is important that we have this debate on a periodic basis to make sure that our code keeps up to date.
It is important that we note this afternoon that we are Members and have the enormous privilege of saying publicly what we think about this code, but this code is important to our staff, and they do not have it. We have heard cases made vociferously this afternoon about individual Members who have felt hard done by, by this code, but we have never heard the other side of the story. One thing that I learned from decades of dealing with these things is that there are always two sides of a story, and what matters is the process which is gone through and the judgments that arise.
Processes such as this are very easy targets. They are very often very easy to take apart, and there has been a flavour of that today. You can seize on particular details and score cheap points. What matters is whether they work in practice. Looking back over the history set out for us in great detail by the noble Lord, Lord Skidelsky, we can say that our processes have worked and have brought about, for staff and Members, an improved environment in which we can all work.
Others may disagree with that, but that is the purpose of this. I think that for the majority of Members, and certainly for a lot of members of staff, it has been an important thing. It is very easy to have a go, and we do when these matters occur. It occurred only this morning on the “Today” programme, where somebody was talking about being abused by a teacher many years ago. I am really pleased that over the past 30 years, young people at work are no longer having to put up in silence with the sort of behaviour that I had to many years ago. They have done that only because—it always follows the same pattern—somebody has to be brave enough to speak up about the existing culture in which they work and to point out the damage.
I listened to Members being outraged about the idea of compulsory training. I look back particularly to my experiences in the workplace, and it was always the people who were most hostile to that who were always terribly surprised to find out that they had in fact been doing things which were greatly offensive or harmful to other people. My experience of being on training courses which were put on in this House was that the majority of people who went on them—and maybe people who did not—learned quite a lot from them and were very grateful. They came out of the room having thought very differently about matters from when they went in and some of them, such as the noble Lord, Lord Balfe, did not feel so worried about talking to members of staff afterwards because they felt that they had gone through the training and they had a greater understanding.
I make one plea to the noble Baroness, in so far as she has any influence, which is that she does not listen to the siren calls about that and to make sure that the training is there. One of the biggest and most important things about a code of conduct is that it is there for protection and for protection against vexatious claims. I have had them made against me, and I have also been involved in defending somebody in the House of Commons from a vexatious claim. The fact that our code was explicit in many ways helped in both of those cases.
I agree with the noble Lord who said that what we say in the Chamber has to be protected. I wish that many of the people who sit in the Chamber and make some of the statements that they do would think more profoundly about the effect that they might be having on other people.
I want to finish with just two observations. In all sorts of areas of life, attitudes to work and the expectations of people who go to work have changed. That is for the better. The more I listen to people coming forward and talking about horrible things that happened to them as individuals in the workplace, the more I think it is a good thing, and we should encourage that, and we do encourage that for other groups. More to the point, in this place we not only criticise other people but legislate about other professions: the Metropolitan Police, doctors and all the rest of them. Therefore, it is more important than ever that we have a process for ourselves and that we apply it to ourselves in a way that meets the highest of standards, and that includes transparency and having input from individuals who sit on the board. They are not random individuals who are put there for no reason; they sit on the board because they have relevant experience and advice to bring to it.
I simply point out that this is a protection not just for us but for our staff, and if we do things well, we have nothing to fear. I hope that the noble Baroness, Lady Manningham-Buller, will convey to her committee that, while it has not been the tenor of the debate today, a lot of us believe that this is very important and we do not want to go back, ever.
Baroness Manningham-Buller (CB)
My Lords, I said at the beginning that I was not going to answer all the points and that this was an evidence-collecting sitting. I very much thank all noble Lords who have contributed. The committee—despite the wish of the noble Lord, Lord Balfe, to abolish it altogether—is determined to do a good job on this Code of Conduct. I point out that we are reviewing it not because any Member of the House asked us to do so but because we, looking at it critically and reading it ourselves on a weekly basis, decided to suggest to the House that we should review it. That is the background. A few errors of fact have been stated in this debate, but I will not pick up on them because they are probably caused by some confusion in the code itself.
I suspect this will be like an outcome to a public inquiry; we will not please everybody. Some will say that we have not gone far enough and some that we have gone too far. We have heard and taken in all that noble Lords have said. If noble Lords who have not spoken have additional things they want to say, they should please send them to me or to the committee’s clerk, Chris Johnson, in the next three weeks and we will take them on board in the same way as we have the comments this afternoon. Thank you very much.