Privileges and Conduct Committee: Fourth Report

Debate between Baroness Royall of Blaisdon and Baroness D'Souza

Thursday 21st October 2010 Lords Chamber

[Baroness Royall of Blaisdon]

My Lords, I, too, support the Motions. These are serious matters—serious for the Members involved, serious for this House and serious for Parliament, politics and the public beyond. We should not forget either that a number of parliamentarians, including two Members of your Lordships' House, are currently facing criminal charges to be tried in court on similar serious matters. But important though the matters before us today unquestionably are, it is important to remember that these are matters that relate to a different moment. When allegations on a number of issues were first made last year against Members of your Lordships' House, we were, in retrospect, in a poor position, our machinery outdated, our procedures similarly so, and our systems not suited to modern scrutiny.

As has been said, on these issues we have come a long way. No system is ever perfect. Any system or procedure is of course capable of improvement. We must not be complacent, but at the same time we now have a new procedure for making complaints, a new system for considering complaints, a new code of conduct against which complaints can be considered, and a new system of financial support for Members of this House. All of that has been reviewed, considered, examined and adopted within a relatively short space of time. Perhaps it was not at the speed which some outside this House would have wanted, but we have done it and what we now have—what this House has itself brought into play—is a whole range of new machinery and new procedures. Getting to this point has not been easy, but whatever we have been able to do has been right.

Today is again another day which is not easy or comfortable for anyone in your Lordships’ House. I feel great sadness. But I believe that the committee has come to the right conclusions on the cases before us and on the report from the sub-committee, and the House should support the Motions before us. The sub-committee did indeed face a very difficult task in dealing with the matters before it, and I, too, thank the members of the sub-committee and their staff for their work. At the same time, however, I believe that the main committee’s judgments in relation to the sub-committee’s report, including where it has diverged from the sub-committee’s recommendations, are right. I believe that the language of the sub-committee’s reports was in part misplaced. I believe that its inclusion of untested hearsay evidence was incorrect and that the penalties proposed by the sub-committee were not appropriate.

As a member of the full committee, I believe that we are right to make the recommendations we are putting before the House today. I welcome especially the proposal for the new Commissioner for Standards to examine issues relating to process that have arisen in the course of bringing the committee’s report before your Lordships’ House and, in particular, to addressing the question of the means by which all relevant evidence can be taken into account in our procedures. That shows that we are ready to examine, and examine continually if necessary, our procedures to make sure that they work and continue to work and to ensure that they are just. This is the right way forward for this House.

On the explicit sanctions before this House today, some may suggest that we were wrong, for instance, to alter the penalties proposed by the sub-committee, but I do not believe that we were wrong to do so. I believe that the approach taken by the full committee is the right one. The committee has judged that the three Members of your Lordships’ House did wrong and we are proposing stringent penalties in response. Just as last year when we took the decision to suspend members of your Lordships’ House for the first time since the age of Cromwell, so today we are proposing that we impose penalties of a severity never seen before in either House of Parliament. That is a tough action to take and a tough action for Members of this House to bear. Although they did wrong, as the report before you correctly concludes, I do not believe that this House will not feel sympathy for the Members involved. I know that I do. However, being aware of their difficulties and indeed, sympathising with them as colleagues in your Lordships’ House, should not for a moment pull us away from our responsibilities. We have a duty to this House, the Members of this House, to Parliament and to politics as a whole to right the wrongs where we find them and to take action as necessary to put our House in order. I have no doubt that this House will do so today.

[Baroness D'Souza]

My Lords, this is a most uncomfortable and disagreeable business, but one from which this House must not, indeed cannot, shirk. I add my thanks on behalf of the Cross Benches to all officials and Peers alike who have been involved in bringing these reports to your Lordships’ House.

Adherence to the code of conduct is a weighty personal responsibility. We in the Privileges and Conduct Committee have been obliged to judge our colleagues—a task that all of us would have preferred to avoid. However, the cases before us affect us all in many different ways. We are undoubtedly tainted by evidence of wrongdoing. The reputation of the House is at stake, which in turn affects the work that we do. The press, grossly duplicitous as it has been in some methods of investigation, has allowed—encouraged, even—the wider public to perceive this House and its work as redundant at best and unworthy of public funds at worst.

We have to face these charges. We must acknowledge and never underestimate how we are now regarded; and we have to do something to redress the balance. Much has been achieved in recent months but part of the long journey back is how we respond to the report of the Committee for Privileges and Conduct before us today and the evidence contained therein. In arriving at our conclusions, the committee relied almost entirely on the evidence directly gained by the sub-committee’s, and our own, questioning, and not on press reports. Our findings uphold the sub-committee’s main conclusions with some adjustments to the recommended sanctions. In particular, we found that any acceptable or natural meaning of “principal” or “main” residence did not and could not apply in these cases no matter how generously the criteria are interpreted.

Distasteful as it is, none of us here can ignore such evidence painstakingly developed by the sub-committee on noble Lords’ conduct, nor can we by our decisions minimise the culpability or impact. To do so would be to deal with these cases less robustly than warranted and, in effect, pull up the drawbridge and refuse to take account of public anger. We have chosen to invoke serious sanctions which I believe are entirely justified by the sub-committee’s report. In so doing, the intention is not only to apply standards that prevail in the world beyond this House but to strengthen the code of conduct and to help restore public confidence in this House.