Conduct Committee

Lord Lilley Excerpts

Wednesday 5th March 2025 Lords Chamber

[Lord Lilley (Con)]

My Lords, I, too, welcome the report, both for its brevity and for its rejection of the idea of introducing an offence of bringing the House into disrepute. But I want to raise some questions that I hope will be considered in any future review, though I do not want to go as far as directing the committee to do so in the way one of the amendments before the House proposes, even though I sympathise with some of its spirit.

I assume the original purpose of having a procedure for dealing with complaints about harassment and bullying was to protect staff, particularly staff who might face bullying by Members of this House who are in a superior position and a position, therefore, to use their influence wrongly. One would hope it would never happen, but if it does, it is right that staff should be protected. But I doubt if the aim or expectation was originally that it would be used to police verbal exchanges between noble Lords. Surely, the presumption is that we are old enough and sensible enough to deal with offensive remarks made by other colleagues without running off to teacher and saying, “Please, miss, Jimmy insulted me in the playground”. That should not be what the procedure is for.

There is a minor cases procedure, but any minor incident of harassment and/or bullying by one Member against another should not be brought. It is ridiculous that one Member should bring that sort of minor incident before this procedure. It is particularly wrong because the procedure itself can be long and damaging. You have a major punishment for a minor case, even if the outcome is effectively to exonerate the person concerned. The process can be the punishment.

I think it was the noble Baroness, Lady Donaghy, who I always assume is right—in most cases that has proved to be safe in the committees on which I have served with her—who said that it was unlikely that these procedures would ever be used for party-political reasons. I am afraid that that shows her good nature. In the other place—they have different rules, but their procedures are of interest—a Labour Member went through every interest held by every Conservative Member and saw whether they had been mentioned in debate where there was a possibility that there might have been a conflict of interest. Scores of people were brought before the commission. I was one, because I had not mentioned that I had an interest in a company that operated exclusively in central Asia, in a debate about domestic energy costs. I had not mentioned it because I did not think it was relevant. The commissioner said she entirely accepted that I had no conflict of interest but that I should have declared it because somebody might have thought I had a conflict of interest: unless I apologised to the House, she would take it to the full committee. I said I had no intention of apologising to the House except possibly for not realising that the commissioner could invent new rules that we had to declare interests we did not have.

This is the problem: rules constantly expand. I have to say I was entirely exonerated by the committee—it was the first time in its history that the recommendations of the commissioner were rejected. But it was brought for party-political reasons. There have been two cases recently before the House where, I understand, the person offended by an accidental insult originally graciously accepted the apology from the person who perpetrated it but then subsequently withdrew the apology and issued a complaint. The suspicion must arise that they had probably been pressed by rather more intransigently party-political colleagues to do so. We must not allow a situation to exist where party politics can be used to abuse a system that is ideally there to protect staff, not ourselves.