Ministerial Appointments: Vetting and Managing Conflicts of Interest

Debate between Lord Sikka and Baroness Neville-Rolfe

Tuesday 24th January 2023 Lords Chamber

[Baroness Neville-Rolfe (Con)]

The noble Lord is right. The other point worth making is that, as a Minister, it is your personal responsibility to make it known to your Permanent Secretary and, if appropriate, to the independent adviser, what conflicts of interest or perceived conflicts of interest you might have. This is a process that is gone through scrupulously, in my experience, when Ministers are appointed.

[Lord Sikka (Lab)]

My Lords, transparency is the biggest antidote to sleaze, which revolves around money. The best way of dealing with this is to ensure that all Ministers publish their tax returns. That policy can be made without waiting for any report from the independent ethics adviser. What objections can the Minister have to that suggestion?

[Baroness Neville-Rolfe (Con)]

There is an issue of balance between privacy and the need to know—the transparency. I have often engaged with the noble Lord on these tax issues and the Prime Minister himself has said that he will publish his tax return, but moving to a different system raises quite a lot of issues of balance. I come back to my point about personal responsibility and explaining where there are these issues or might be conflicts of interest when you are a Minister, or if circumstances change.

Government Contracts: Bain & Company

Debate between Lord Sikka and Baroness Neville-Rolfe

Wednesday 23rd November 2022 Lords Chamber

[Baroness Neville-Rolfe (Con)]

There is corporate law which involves the suspension of directors, but I am not able to speak about it today; it is dealt with by another department. However, our new Procurement Bill improves the arrangements for debarment where exclusion is needed, perhaps because there has been insolvency, dishonesty, impropriety or a serious breach of ethical and professional standards. We will discuss that in this House on Report next week. I think we are moving forward in this area although we have to be fair and balanced, as the UK Government always try to be.

[Lord Sikka (Lab)]

My Lords, as the Minister knows, there is no central enforcer of corporate law in the UK and the whole scene is very disjointed. While the Minister is in the mood to tackle corruption, can I invite her to tell the House whether any of the big four accounting firms, whose tax avoidance schemes have been declared unlawful by the courts, have at any time during the last 12 years been investigated, prosecuted or fined, or have the Government even bothered to recover a penny of the legal costs?

[Baroness Neville-Rolfe (Con)]

I am grateful to the noble Lord for his comments, but it goes rather beyond today’s Question. However, I can say that the Cabinet Office conducted an in-depth review into KPMG following the finding against the firm of dishonesty in its role in the sale of the Silentnight group of companies. In fact, the review concluded that KPMG should not be excluded because it had carried out self-cleaning measures —that is where a company moves to demonstrate reliability and improve its compliance systems. It is very important that companies can do the right thing, particularly where mistakes have been made.