Standards in Public Life

Lord Puttnam Excerpts

Thursday 9th September 2021 Lords Chamber

[Lord Puttnam (Lab)]

My Lords, it is a pleasure to follow the right reverend Prelate the Bishop of Oxford, although in all honesty I would have preferred to have been book-ended by Conservative Peers, as it is to members of their party that most of my remarks, rather like those of the noble Lord, Lord Blunkett, are necessarily addressed. I find it deeply regrettable that so few Conservative voices have chosen to contribute to the subject which, as a young man, I thought was synonymous with everything the party stood for.

I hope the Minister will offer the House some form of explanation as to when the subject of standards in public life became so far removed from his Government’s concerns. I also hope he will acknowledge that his party, many of whom over the past quarter of a century I have had the opportunity to befriend, listen to and respect, have found themselves at a point where their Government gets “nil points” in all seven categories of the Nolan principles.

It was to address a self-inflicted parliamentary crisis that Sir John Major, a man for whom I have nothing but respect, helped encode what most believed to be a self-evident set of standards to be followed by those pursuing careers in political and public life. It was not a particularly complicated set of standards, and, with our traditional sense of complacency, most of us believed that, with the odd tilt of the tiller, we could retain, or gain, the sense of self-respect that we had always believed ourselves to enjoy. We were horribly wrong. How often have I heard wiser voices than mine in this House warn against the dangers of the slippery slope? Where standards in public life are concerned, the present Government have taken us careening down the Cresta Run.

Little over a year ago, I had the honour of chairing a special committee of this House, compiling a report entitled Digital Technology and the Resurrection of Trust. I had originally intended the title to read, “The restoration of trust”, but the evidence that our committee received was so damning that, in our judgment, nothing less than a “resurrection” of trust would be sufficient to regain broad public confidence. At several points in the report, we made particular reference to the Committee on Standards in Public Life as being the most appropriate body to support, and even help to deliver, a number of our unanimous recommendations.

So far, the pandemic has prevented the House debating that report. Of course, it is possible that differing views might surface, but our report was published six months before the horrifying Trump-inspired spectacle that occurred in Washington on 6 January. I sincerely believe that many of our conclusions precisely anticipated those events. We argued that, far from being outdated, the Nolan principles were more relevant in a digital environment than ever. I will go further: anyone who believes that our fragile form of western parliamentary democracy can withstand a barrage of duplicity, deceit and obfuscation—most especially when its principal source is from within our own Government—is a danger to themselves and to the very best of everything that this House has ever represented.

The Government’s claim, reiterated by the Minister at the conclusion of Monday evening’s debate, that the Prime Minister—particularly this Prime Minister—should have sole responsibility for setting the standards and making public appointments is rather like offering Basil Fawlty sole responsibility for developing closer relationships with our European friends and neighbours.

In conclusion, I have no idea how long I will be around, but, with all the force and energy that I can possibly muster, I beg those many decent Conservative Peers and Members of another House with a concern for the principles of parliamentary democracy to do what they know they will have to do sooner or later: muster the courage to say to the Prime Minister, “In God’s name, go. Go before you destroy the last sliver of self-respect that our party can call its own”.

Conduct of Debate in Public Life

Lord Puttnam Excerpts

Thursday 9th May 2019 Lords Chamber

[Lord Puttnam (Lab)]

My Lords, I, too, thank the noble Lord, Lord Harris, for making this debate possible. It is timely and it certainly is important.

Almost 49 years ago, I travelled to Heidelberg to meet Albert Speer, Hitler’s former architect and Armaments Minister, who had recently been released after 21 years in Spandau prison. I had audaciously put in a bid to buy the film rights to his then best-selling book, Inside the Third Reich. Like many born during wartime, I was desperately eager for a better understanding of how Hitler came to power, with consequences that dominated the lives of my parents’ generation.

By some miracle of luck and timing, my partner and I won the rights to the book, which led to our spending many hours probing and questioning Speer’s motivations, with the opportunity to go well beyond what was actually in the book. One story in particular stands out. He said that he was walking in Berlin a day or two after Kristallnacht, surveying the damage done to Jewish property and shops. He claimed to have been appalled by what was going on, but by now his principal concern was that the glass was cleared away before any child fell and cut themselves. He made the point that it is quite shocking how quickly the unthinkable becomes thinkable, then normalised, and, eventually, in the final phase of populism, brutally enforced.

In chapter 2 of his book, he writes:

“I did see a couple of rough spots in the Party doctrine. But I assumed they would be polished in time …The crucial fact appeared to me to be that I personally had to choose between a future Communist Germany or a future National Socialist Germany, since the political center between these antipodes had melted away. Moreover in 1931 I had reason to believe that Hitler was moving in a more moderate direction … Hitler was trying to appear respectable in order to seem qualified to enter the government”.


In other words, he was seeking to legitimise himself and his party in order to take back control. Does any of that sound remotely familiar? In the event, we produced two documentaries. The first, entitled “Double-Headed Eagle”, covered the years 1918 to 1933, and the second, “Swastika”, took the story from 1933 to 1945.

I have always believed that this narrative ought to be compulsory viewing for anyone attracted to the simplistic rants of Nigel Farage or his venomous counterpart, Stephen Yaxley-Lennon—or “Tommy Robinson”, as he prefers to be called. When I was growing up, the term “nationalistic” was synonymous with a particularly pernicious form of authoritarian government. Somehow, the debates in this country around Brexit have allowed it to become somewhat re-legitimised. Nationalism is not the same as patriotism and they should never, ever be confused. This drift is a process that we in this House should be doing everything possible to overcome. To better inform that opposition, I thoroughly recommend an excellent new book by the young historian Tim Bouverie, entitled Appeasing Hitler.

Last Friday, the Labour MP Lisa Nandy gave the Clement Attlee Memorial Lecture at University College Oxford. It was a wonderful lecture and I can do no better than quote directly from it. She said:

“The problems of a deeply divided nation, and the many heartfelt views on Brexit, and the things Brexit has come to symbolise, are not going to vanish. They are complex, demanding of nuance and will not be wished or voted away”.


She went on to say:

“Never think that ‘the blood-dimmed tide’ is a threat only to immigrants and minorities. It is a threat to all of us. We all need constitutional protection, we need a centre that holds. Those who believe in civil discourse, who respect the truth, must be willing to find a common cause”.


I cannot top that, other than to remember that, in the final chapter of what was to be his last book, the late Lord Clarke—Kenneth Clarke—asks himself which of all human qualities he most values. It would be reasonable to assume that, as our foremost art historian, he would opt for some cultural reference. Instead he offers just one word: “civility”.

Civility will not be regained by accident. It is my belief that every Member of your Lordships’ House has an absolute obligation to ensure that civility once again becomes the watchword in the practice of politics in this country. When he replies, I sincerely hope that the Minister will offer the Government’s determination not to allow extremism in its many forms to undermine what all noble Lords seem to realise is a dangerously fragile democracy.

Government Procurement Policy

Lord Puttnam Excerpts

Thursday 24th November 2011 Lords Chamber

[Lord Puttnam]

My Lords, I, too, thank the noble Lord, Lord Sugar, for making this important debate possible. He managed to set out the principal issues in an honest and typically pugnacious way. The thrust of his speech that particularly impressed me was his insistence that we stop pretending that we are goody two-shoes and start to play the procurement game in the way that it is successfully practised in France, Germany, the Netherlands, Canada and, by the most sophisticated and unyielding protectionist of them all, the United States.

He also made what I believe to be a crucial point in stressing that the most economically advantageous deal may not always be the cheapest price and that there are wider social impacts to consider. To put it another way, I suggest that the overriding aim of successful procurement should always be driving costs down while driving value up. It is this concept of where true value lies that turns procurement from a job or a task into an art, or certainly a craft—one that is able to look right across the value chain and understand the full implications of its remit.

Perhaps I may put a little flesh on that assertion by offering your Lordships an example of what I mean from not all that many years ago. Here, like the noble Lord, Lord Sugar, I must declare an interest, but it is one of those interests that in my judgment adds rather than detracts from the experience that I bring to this House. I am very proud to be the senior non-executive director of Promethean, a British company, founded in Blackburn, and one of the two global leaders in interactive classroom technology.

About eight years ago the then Government sensibly took the view that advances in education were very likely to be technology-driven and that a window of opportunity existed for the UK to become a world leader in the provision of educational hardware and software. Significant government resources were found and a serious procurement programme, amounting to well over £500 million, was put in place. As usual, no particular favours were shown to UK suppliers, that being the ideological stance of the then Labour Government. I should stress that the commitment to procurement from global markets was at that time both fashionable and ideologically driven—wrongheaded in my view but, to its credit, entirely genuine.

In respect of Promethean—and this was long before I joined the board—what was being offered was a very advanced piece of technology together with a pretty comprehensive training package, sufficient to allow the teacher to familiarise him or herself with the full educational potential of the product. As the government procurement process began to bite and the price was squeezed, something had to go. It could have been the R&D commitment to future innovation. Happily, the company decided to protect that. What went instead was the training package. And with what result? For the next few years, white boards, from a variety of manufacturers, were being purchased and shipped to schools, colleges and other institutions in which nobody had the skills to use them. I would guess that hundreds, maybe even a few thousand, found their way into cupboards or were simply never taken out of the wrapping paper for fear of embarrassing staff who were simply never offered the training, and the resulting confidence, adequately to use them.

Procurement in its crudest and most unimaginative form had done its job, but far from creating real value—certainly, value as any one of us would understand it—or helping to build a successful UK-based business, let alone improving the education of an entire cohort of children, it had managed, in effect, to defeat the entire purpose of the exercise. Happily, much of that damage has since been rectified by a generation of enthusiastic and digitally literate heads and teachers, but several vital years and myriad opportunities were lost through the practice of what the noble Lord, Lord Sugar, rightly describes as ill thought-through procurement policies.

I have a dream, and it is a dream that has recurred time and again since my arrival in your Lordships’ House some 14 years ago. That dream is to read a government response to a thoughtful, well argued and thoroughly constructive report by a committee of this House which is similarly thoughtful, similarly well argued and, most important of all, equally constructive. On this occasion the report in question is that of the Science and Technology Committee, entitled Public Procurement as a Tool to Stimulate Innovation.

As I see it, intelligent procurement is all about asking the right questions and understanding what might be the ultimate, long-term national objective. That will not necessarily be the same objective as that of the Treasury, which is invariably tied to a far more short-term view. The report of the committee to which I refer asks all the right questions in a polite and reasoned way. The Government’s response is equally polite, but by my reading falls well short of the degree of urgency and commitment that the committee seeks. The committee makes it clear that it intends to return to this subject next year. I seriously welcome that assurance. But when it does, and assuming that it is as disappointed with progress as I rather expect it to be, I hope that it will follow the example of the noble Lord, Lord Sugar, and be prepared seriously to take the gloves off.

The committee’s hand was strengthened earlier this week by Vince Cable’s welcome announcement of the appointment of Phil Smith, the chief executive of the technology company Cisco, as the new chair of the Government’s Technology Strategy Board. As the committee’s report makes clear, the TSB is ideally placed to influence and maybe even drive through many of its recommendations. In my judgment, the board could not have a better ally in whom to entrust the change of culture that both the committee and the noble Lord, Lord Sugar, are pressing for. I would suggest that this House should commit itself to offering Mr Smith every possible scrap of support in delivering the improvements in policy and practice that are being argued for in this extremely well-timed debate.

Perhaps I may finish with this observation. I find it very strange that for a debate on an economic subject which all but obsesses, and has obsessed over the years, the Conservatives in opposition and in government, they have not put forward a single spokesperson. I am sure that the noble Lord, Lord Wallace, will more than adequately reply for the coalition, but it seems odd that a subject of such enormous importance and which is so central to many elements of Conservative philosophy is not seen to be important enough for them to put up a speaker.