Standards in Public Life

Lord Martin of Springburn Excerpts

Tuesday 4th February 2014 Lords Chamber

[Lord Martin of Springburn (CB)]

My Lords, I, too, am grateful to the noble Lord, Lord Bew, for securing this debate. Our national poet, Robert Burns, often spoke about seeing the good in people. Perhaps we can see the good in people in public life because there are so many who are all too ready to highlight those who do the wrong thing.

However, my thoughts go to the fact that we have thousands of men and women up and down the United Kingdom, including in Northern Ireland, who have chosen to serve in local government for very little reward. Those men and women hold down their jobs and go to meetings of the council. At night, they attend the public meetings that we have with the housing associations or the tenants’ associations. They also deal with what some people would consider to be the little things, such as repairs to the sinks or drainpipes, or cleaning up the play area. A Speaker in the United States, Tip O’Neill, once said that all politics is local. We might call what these men and women in local government do “the little things” but it is important to remember that those things are important to the elderly, the mothers who want a play area to be cleaned up and all the other people who are worried about their community. As those men and women are not here at Westminster, sometimes constituents come to their door and disturb them even when they are having a family meal.

Your Lordships should remember that we often tut-tut when we are in conversation about non-traditional housing: the corridor houses and multi-storey flats in our cities. Not all of those places are bad to live in but because of the climate we have in this country the local authority gets the blame. In the 1960s and 1970s, when those men and women who were in local government wanted to clear the slums away and give people decent homes, it was central government who said to them, “You will not get government funding unless you build non-traditional houses”. When the problems arose, the blame lay with local government and the Government distanced themselves from the difficulties.

What I can say about the other place is that there are those who have brought the Commons to shame. We should remember that there are 650 Members of Parliament and that they are excellent at working on an all-party basis. Although I do not have the time, I advise noble Lords to read the adjournment debate which Mr Chris Skidmore raised on dangerous driving, in which dozens of Members from all parties took part.