Public Institutions
Debate between Lord Fairfax of Cameron and Lord Pearson of Rannoch
Lord Fairfax of Cameron
Anyone who listened to that question will realise that I cannot say that there has been but, as the noble Lord heard, in the Code of Conduct the question is whether a reasonable member of the public might think that such was the case if they knew the facts.
Lord Pearson of Rannoch (UKIP)
My Lords, perhaps I can help the noble Lord on that question. There is no doubt that the European Commission has threatened people with the loss of their pension if they do not toe the EU line. One of those people is the redoubtable and wonderful Marta Andreasen, who noble Lords may remember was the chief accountant of the European Union and as such refused to sign its fraudulent accounts. She was threatened with the loss of her pension. Another is the former French Prime Minister, Madame Édith Cresson, who had an arrangement with her dentist which was less than wholly proper. When she came to trial in front of the Commission, it decided not to take her pension away because she had gone through enough suffering. I wanted to help the noble Lord with his interjection, which supports our side of the argument rather more than his.
Lord Fairfax of Cameron
As I was saying, I, as a new Member of this House—albeit the second time round—was genuinely surprised when I received the letter of rejection from the committee, because I honestly thought that the arguments we had set out in our letter in this day and age were frankly unanswerable, and there are further reasons for so saying. This is of course now 2016, after the expenses scandal and the seven Nolan principles of public life. What once may have been acceptable, if it ever was, no longer is. This exemption, in my submission, is now out of date. To paraphrase my noble friend Lord Lexden, who spoke in the previous debate, it does not pass muster any longer.
Secondly, I refer to the Survey of Public Attitudes Towards Conduct in Public Life 2014 contained in the briefing pack provided by the Library for this debate. It contains two quite telling sentences:
“Overall, the survey suggests that the public continue to have a very poor valuation of the current standards in public life”;
and,
“Overall, the survey paints a fairly bleak picture of the public’s perceptions of standards in public life”.
In its April 2016 letter in reply to ours, the committee simply stated that it had previously considered this matter on three occasions and that it,
“could not identify a material development since it last considered the matter which should cause it to reconsider its position”.
There we have it: a particularly important committee of this House, comprised, as noble Lords will see when they look at its composition, of some very senior and distinguished Members, professes to respect openness and accountability while at the same time by some of its decisions apparently rejecting the principle of transparency. I am led to go on to say that it is no wonder that the public have the low regard for standards in public life that is noted in the briefing pack, as noble Lords have just heard.
As soon as I heard that this debate had come up in the ballot and I got the date for it, I gave notice to the chairman of the committee and implicitly invited him and any of his committee members to attend but, as far as I am aware, none of them is in the Chamber today.