Privileges and Conduct
Debate between Lord Evans of Weardale and Lord Foulkes of Cumnock
Lord Evans of Weardale (CB)
My Lords, I declare my interest in the register as the chairman of the Committee on Standards in Public Life. However, I speak on my own account. I very much welcome the report from the Privileges and Conduct Committee, which seems to be a significant step forward. But, as the Senior Deputy Speaker said, it is a step forward rather than the final step in the whole process. In particular, the increased independence that will be part of the construction of the conduct committee is extremely important. I share the view of the noble Lord, Lord Thomas of Gresford, that we need to continue in that direction and that a minority position for independence may not be satisfactory, particularly when difficult cases are being adjudicated, because public opinion on these issues is moving forward and we clearly need to be in step with it. The proceedings in this House before Christmas were clearly not in step with it, and I am therefore grateful that we will not be revisiting that episode, which I think was probably discreditable to us all.
On the question raised by the noble Lord, Lord Foulkes, about the bicameral nature of this, we need to recognise that this is a complex series of interlocking pieces of process. Various pieces of process are happening in your Lordships’ House, and a variety of pieces of procedure are happening in the other House. We must bear in mind that this is a totality. We cannot entirely separate what happens here from what happens there, not least because the House of Commons, the other place, is considering the question of non-recent conduct, which is likely to extend back considerably further than is currently proposed in your Lordships’ House. There is a difference there, but of course there is movement between the two Houses, so we may find that procedures in the other place impact on Members here. We need to bear in mind that those are linked issues and, I believe, in the public mind, they would be seen as part of the same issue. Therefore, we need to bear in mind how they are being played at both ends. At the moment, there is of course a considerable difference between the procedures here and those in the other place, even though there is some movement in the direction of co-ordination between the two.
Lord Foulkes of Cumnock
I agree with what the noble Lord says about working together and agreeing a bicameral core operation. However, things are different. To illustrate the public mind, I was sitting in my office in Millbank House. The phone rang, and someone from a corporate office said, “Could I speak to Lord Foulkes’s diary secretary?”. I said, “You’re speaking to him”. They think we have a whole panoply of members of staff working for us. We need to get over the point that that is not the case.
Lord Evans of Weardale
I entirely take the noble Lord’s point and would welcome having a diary secretary myself, but I do not. It is clear that we do not have identical working procedures at both ends of the Palace. Nevertheless, the principles are the same. We also need to recognise that if there are changes in the procedures in another place, we need to consider how they might impact here and vice versa. We need to make sure that there is visibility in the procedures at both ends. It is not clear to me that there has been quite as much visibility in the recent period as one might from the outside have expected.
I welcome the fact that the new conduct committee will look at and take forward the work that has been done by the Privileges and Conduct Committee so far. I think that we are still some way from reaching a perfect system; I suspect that we will never reach one because there will always be changes both in public expectations and in procedures that need to be reviewed. However, we have been provided with a helpful step in the right direction and I look forward to the new procedures being put in place.