Ministerial Code: Investigation of Potential Breach

Lord Wallace of Saltaire Excerpts

Thursday 25th May 2023 Lords Chamber

[The Minister of State, Cabinet Office (Baroness Neville-Rolfe) (Con)]

My Lords, the Ministerial Code sets out the standards of conduct expected of Ministers and how they discharge their duties. As the noble Baroness said, the Prime Minister is the ultimate judge of the standards of behaviour expected of a Minister and the appropriate consequences of a breach of those standards. That is indeed why he decides, as she has explained, but in light of advice from the independent adviser. The Prime Minister moved quickly to appoint an independent adviser, Sir Laurence Magnus, on whose advice he relies.

The noble Baroness asked why this system is not set up independently. This subject has been looked at by committees. Indeed, last year, as we discussed before, we did make some changes to the independent adviser’s powers and gave him more support. We believe that having an independent system would be a problem. An independent commission or system would amass considerable unelected power over the workings of government in somebody who does not have an elected mandate, without the checks and balances and accountabilities of elected politicians. We are here to debate, in a democratic way, circumstances that have gone on including, of course, the Home Secretary and the issue of the speed awareness course, which was the subject of this Question earlier in the week.

The criteria for investigating a breach, of course, depend on the circumstances. As the noble Baroness will know, the Ministerial Code is very wide ranging. It is the Prime Minister’s code, so he is rightly the decision-maker. The criteria for a particular investigation will depend on the issue being investigated.

[Lord Wallace of Saltaire (LD)]

My Lords, this is a small issue concerning a larger problem, which is the unconstrained and unaccountable prerogative powers of the Prime Minister and the deterioration of relations between the Civil Service and Ministers, which has come up again and again in recent years. I am puzzled and disappointed by the Minister’s reply to the Leader of the Opposition. The Answer in the Commons made a very strong point of saying, “This is the Prime Minister’s code and the Prime Minister is, in effect, the judge and jury of everything that happens”.

Toward the end of the last Labour Government, there were some rather good committee reports in the Commons on whether we now needed to limit the Prime Minister’s prerogative powers. I wonder whether, if the Conservatives found themselves in opposition again, they would not perhaps wish to revive that debate. I would hope that a Labour Government—or another Government of some sort—would begin to address that problem. If the independent adviser is really independent, why does he not have the ability to start his own investigations and then present them to the Prime Minister?

[Baroness Neville-Rolfe (Con)]

I will not speculate on what might happen under a different Government. I remind the noble Lord that there have been a number of reports on ethics and integrity, including from Nigel Boardman and the Committee on Standards in Public Life, and, as I said recently, we will lay our responses in Parliament in due course. However, I draw the House’s attention again to Sir Laurence Magnus, who has been appointed and has set off in a robust way. His report, which I promised would come out in May, is due to be published today—it may already have been or will be any minute.

I also draw attention to the fact that we strengthened the remit of the independent adviser in 2022. Slightly contrary to what the noble Lord was saying, the adviser now has the ability to initiate an investigation under the Ministerial Code after consulting with the Prime Minister, and the normal expectation is that the Prime Minister would agree to such an investigation. We have also updated the code to include more specific references to the duty on Ministers to provide the independent adviser with information reasonably necessary for carrying out the role. As I said before, we have also strengthened the arrangements for the office of the independent adviser, providing him with a dedicated secretariat of civil servants. However, I come back to the point I made before to the noble Baroness: this must be elective—it has to be democratic. That is why the Prime Minister decides on these matters.

List of Ministers’ Interests and Ministerial Code

Lord Wallace of Saltaire Excerpts

Tuesday 25th April 2023 Lords Chamber

[Baroness Neville-Rolfe (Con)]

The Government’s work on reforms to strengthen ethics and integrity in central government is now nearing conclusion and we hope to publish our response soon. There have been a number of reports, including Upholding Standards in Public Life, the recommendations of Sir Nigel Boardman’s report on supply chain finance, and PACAC’s fourth report, so we can look forward to a response.

[Lord Wallace of Saltaire (LD)]

My Lords, we welcome the belated publication of the latest version of ministerial interests. There is a related document which we are also impatiently awaiting, which is the Cabinet Manual. The Government have promised that they will publish it within the foreseeable future, and I understand that there is already a draft in Whitehall. Can the Minister give us any indication of when that Cabinet Manual draft will be complete and will be published?

[Baroness Neville-Rolfe (Con)]

Work is in progress and it will be published in due course.

Parliamentary Democracy in the United Kingdom

Lord Wallace of Saltaire Excerpts

Tuesday 25th April 2023 Lords Chamber

[Lord Wallace of Saltaire (LD)]

My Lords, I am very happy to welcome the right reverend Prelate to this House. He comes from an interesting background. Apart from being a priest in the south of England, Leicester and Staffordshire, he has also worked in Japan. He was involved in setting up the national Christian Muslim Forum and now chairs the Council of Christians and Jews. I gather he is also one of the Church of England’s team of bishops for prisons. That is a good range of expertise from which to speak with authority in this House. We look forward to that, and to him, as with his colleagues, bringing his diocesan perspective to this sometimes rather overly metropolitan House.

Anyone who has read Anthony Seldon’s account of the Johnson Government in the Times in recent days must doubt whether parliamentary democracy has been saved or strengthened since 2019. We should all be worried by the quality of democratic government in the UK and the damage that has been done to its conventions. The events in Washington two years ago have shown how delicate commitment to constitutional democracy can be.

Like the noble Lord, Lord Norton, I worry about the depth of public disillusion in the UK about democratic politics, above all about Westminster and how it operates. I worry even more about the depth of disillusion among the young, few of whom now vote, let alone join political parties, and turn to the streets instead to campaign.

I worry about ministerial attacks on the rule of law—that essential part of democracy. I worry about the colonisation of the Conservative Party by US Republicans, national conservatives and Christian nationalists, with their well-funded organisations, dragging the Conservatives towards an illiberal authoritarianism. I worry that the noble Lord, Lord Frost, has become more of a national conservative than a Conservative, although I am happy that the noble Lord, Lord Hannan, seems to have resisted some of that tendency.

I worry about the creeping spread of conspiracy theories, which inspire and energise anti-democratic fantasists, of allegations about a hidden deep state or a controlling liberal elite. I worry about the willingness of our right-wing media to help spread such theories. I worry about the fringe of right-wing extremists, fired up by social media, who talk about violence, some of whom, sadly, have gone on to kill politicians.

I worry about what would happen if we had a change of Government who then failed to change the way British politics works, leaving at the following election the only effective alternative: a Conservative Party that had drifted further to the right. None of us should be complacent about the strength of our constitution or democracy. We need more than a change of Government; we need a change of political culture and structure.

House of Lords: Regional Representativeness

Lord Wallace of Saltaire Excerpts

Wednesday 22nd March 2023 Lords Chamber

[Baroness Neville-Rolfe (Con)]

There are indeed different sources from which representation of this House can be drawn. That includes, of course, former politicians— I draw your Lordships’ attention to the diversity of the current Cabinet. I also ask noble Lords to look around them. I am glad to be one of many women who serve on the Front Bench in this House.

[Lord Wallace of Saltaire (LD)]

My Lords, I declare an interest as someone whose registered address is in London but whose allotment is in Saltaire. Pending the introduction of at least an elected element—directly or indirectly—in this House, would the Minister agree that some of the most effective and useful Members are those who have formerly been the leaders of councils all over the United Kingdom, and that greater attention to nominating Members of this House who had local government experience would be a good thing?

Civil Service Impartiality

Lord Wallace of Saltaire Excerpts

Tuesday 7th March 2023 Lords Chamber

[Baroness Neville-Rolfe (Con)]

But, in my own case, I left to go to Tesco, where I served for 15 years. I then took a different path. I served as a civil servant with due impartiality and indeed confidentiality of everything that I did and learned there, and that will be a requirement for Ms Gray.

[Lord Wallace of Saltaire (LD)]

My Lords, I declare an interest as the husband of a former civil servant and the father of a civil servant. To repeat what William Wragg, the chairman of PACAC, said in the debate yesterday in the Commons:

“It is important to ask”


the Minister

“whether he shares my concern that it is wrong to impugn an entire civil service for political bias, and that it is important that he asserts that from the Dispatch Box”.—[Official Report, Commons, 2/3/23; col. 26]

Is that not the most important thing for a Minister to do? As for the current concern, this was a leak by Sky News. I would have thought that we were all interested in ensuring that, if there is a change of Government after the next election, it is competently prepared and served. After the relative chaos we have had over the past five years, of too many Ministers moving too quickly, with some members of the Government deeply suspicious of the Civil Service all the way through, should we not welcome this achievement?

[Baroness Neville-Rolfe (Con)]

It is for the Civil Service of the day to prepare for Governments, as I remember doing in 1997, with three lots of policies. It is very important that ACOBA looks at this appointment. The business appointment rules govern the process by which civil servants take up new employment—it is part of their contract. As my right honourable friend the Paymaster-General said in the other place, there are various sets of rules and guidance designed to make sure that impartiality is observed in the Civil Service, particularly with the movement of senior Ministers or civil servants into other jobs.

Emergency Planning

Lord Wallace of Saltaire Excerpts

Monday 20th February 2023 Lords Chamber

[Baroness Neville-Rolfe (Con)]

As the noble Lord suggests, we have a well-developed system of local resilience through the 38 local resilience forums. I have received no reports myself of particular concerns they have raised on this matter. It is more a matter for DLUHC than for the Cabinet Office, but I will look into it and get back to the noble Lord.

[Lord Wallace of Saltaire (LD)]

My Lords, what lessons have the Government learned from the failure to anticipate a major pandemic of the sort we have now faced with Covid? Have the Government initiated any new proposals for contingency planning ahead of major predictable crises of that sort?

[Baroness Neville-Rolfe (Con)]

The Government had the advantage—or disadvantage—of the lessons from Covid, when they were conducting the review I mentioned. Since then, they have published the UK Government Resilience Framework, which shows a lot of frameworks. A completely independent review is also going on, the Covid inquiry, which I am sure will teach us more lessons on what to do in serious emergencies in the future.

Civil Service: Digital Skills

Lord Wallace of Saltaire Excerpts

Monday 20th February 2023 Lords Chamber

[Baroness Neville-Rolfe (Con)]

It is a pleasure to see the noble Lord in his place; I congratulate him on his return and on his daughter’s eminence. The answer is that of course Ministers need to be educated in digital and data matters as well. We are doing our own small part in the Cabinet Office by ensuring that the induction that Ministers are given on security, for example, has a suitable data element. There is the broader point of what data can bring to growth and science. I earlier referenced the new department, DSIT, which is symptomatic of the change that we are trying to make in government to think more of AI, the cloud and data. To go back to the noble Baroness’s point, we are also trying to make sure that we are thinking about people and values at the same time.

[Lord Wallace of Saltaire (LD)]

My Lords, the British Government are lagging behind several of their European counterparts in digital transformation. Can the Minister say what she regards as the other obstacles, apart from lack of skills? Are there still legal obstacles, in that the way data is handled by different departments is different under existing Acts, or are there other obstacles that we need to tackle in order to catch up with the Baltic states and others that have gone a great deal further in moving towards efficient digital government?

[Baroness Neville-Rolfe (Con)]

I used to sit on the Competitiveness Council in Brussels, in the days when we were in the EU, and learned a lot from the Estonians—but of course they have a much smaller country and they were able to start everything digitally. I think people have admired us for the step we took, now 10 years ago, with GOV.UK, hosting all government paperwork and data. That now has 99% recognition across the UK, which I find very surprising. To answer the question, there are of course difficulties. Digital skills, which is the subject of this Question, is probably the biggest difficulty, but data sharing is also very important. We are finding this with all the various data initiatives we are doing—for example, I am working on borders—where being able to share data between companies, or to share individuals’ data between departments, is extremely important. We are gradually making sure that we are getting the right powers to do that in different areas as Bills come before your Lordships’ House.

Ministerial Appointments: Vetting and Managing Conflicts of Interest

Lord Wallace of Saltaire Excerpts

Tuesday 24th January 2023 Lords Chamber

[Baroness Neville-Rolfe (Con)]

The independent adviser, as my noble friend suggests, is appointed by the Prime Minister and it his constitutional position to be the ultimate arbiter of the Ministerial Code, and to decide whether a breach of the code has occurred upon the advice of the independent adviser. So it makes sense for the Prime Minister to be the ultimate decision-maker, but, of course, we have appointed Sir Laurie Magnus to take on this role and to look extremely carefully at the issues that have arisen and been reported on this week.

[Lord Wallace of Saltaire (LD)]

My Lords, the last Prime Minister but three made great play of the distinction between “people from somewhere” and “people from anywhere”. I thought, at the time, that the real people from anywhere were those who try to avoid paying their taxes and arrange their financial affairs somewhere else—in offshore financial centres and elsewhere. Could the Minister assure us that part of the questioning of the suitability of people for ministerial appointments should significantly include questions about offshore financial arrangements and tax avoidance?

[Baroness Neville-Rolfe (Con)]

There is an established procedure that anyone who is fortunate enough to be appointed a Minister goes through, and that includes a number of questions. Indeed, when candidates are put forward to HOLAC for the House of Lords, that is also the case. Tax is one of the areas of questioning but, in relation to today’s debate, clearly the independent adviser will be looking into these matters. It is clear that the Prime Minister became aware of media reports, but when the Minister without Portfolio was appointed, he was told that there were no outstanding issues. Obviously, the details of an individual’s tax affairs are confidential, but this is an important area of inquiry.

Civil Contingencies Act 2004 (Amendment of List of Responders) Order 2023

Lord Wallace of Saltaire Excerpts

Monday 23rd January 2023 Grand Committee

[Lord Wallace of Saltaire (LD)]

My Lords, I too thank the Minister for this. This comes in the midst of strong negative comments across the House about the way in which Ministers are now handling too many SIs and too much delegated legislation. This seems to be a model of how it should work, and I compliment the Minister.

I am most acutely interested in the flood prevention area. As the “Saltaire” in my title suggests, we live on—happily, above—the River Aire. Indeed, the weekend before last, we walked down to see just how high the river had got. We well remember when, four winters ago, it was higher than it had been for over a century. All of us in Yorkshire who live below the Pennines are now conscious of the increasing flood risk which we all face and how much of a problem this becomes in terms of the multiagency response when floods happen. Happily, we are not in the Yorkshire coal-mining area, and lead mining is more of a legacy problem in the Dales, but I am conscious that in the acute wet weather last summer, there were potholes in the limestone region which filled up with water for the first time in nearly a century. Clearly, we are in exceptional circumstances and the potential for danger, loss of life and loss of property is now higher than it has been.

I have a few brief questions. In the consultation, were other agencies considered for addition to the list of category 2 responders? How good are the links between Defra as responsible for the countryside, the Environment Agency as responsible for drainage and the various LRFs and others concerned with flood risk? We are all aware, particularly those of us who live in the shadow of the hills, that how you look after catchment areas relates very clearly to the degree of flood risk that is involved. As the climate changes, that is something that needs broader attention at local, regional and national level. Are the Government happy that local resilience forums work well? The Minister will also have noticed the growing chorus of unease about the overcentralisation of England and the weakening power and finances of local authorities and local agencies. Local resilience forums are very important in areas such as this—these are people who know the ground; they know where the coal mines were and where the other local hazards are—and I hope that they work well.

Finally, my noble friend Lady Brinton raised electricity supply as one of the factors in dealing with disasters. I am conscious that we are moving in a direction in which electricity will increasingly become the only source of power supply for a growing number of homes. As it happens, at present my wife is in dispute with BT, which is trying to remove our landline and give us phone access only by broadband. That means that when and if there is an electricity problem, we are likely to run out of juice with which to make phone calls fairly rapidly. That is an extra hazard that we are moving into because one of the utilities wants to get rid of the costs of maintaining landlines. I hope that the Cabinet Office has also considered this as an important risk factor in case of emergency.

Having said all that, I welcome this order and I repeat: this is a model SI in the way it is being scrutinised—unlike many others.

[Lord Collins of Highbury (Lab)]

My Lords, I too welcome the Minister’s introduction to the SI. Certainly, it is one of the least controversial ones that I have ever dealt with, so I will not labour the point too much.

I would like the Minister to comment on how well the CCA five-yearly review works. Bearing in mind that, on Radio 4, the Environment Agency’s comments on the risk of river flooding were so closely aligned to the Meteorological Office’s warnings, I wonder what difference this statutory obligation will make. Will it have added value? The two things here that have come out of the review are so logical that one wonders why this was not done before. Will the department add other elements of the review? Are there elements that will still require action?

Certainly, there can be no reason for not adding these two bodies as category 2 responders; I am sure that both are currently working to provide information and support. The Minister said that they will not perform additional duties; they are already performing the duties, so there will be no additional cost, but I would like to know how this statutory responsibility will add to the benefit of their work.

With those few comments, I support the order and wish it well.

Public Service Ombudsman for England

Lord Wallace of Saltaire Excerpts

Tuesday 10th January 2023 Lords Chamber

[Baroness Neville-Rolfe (Con)]

The trouble is that combining the existing public services ombudsmen—there are several, as the noble Lord explained—would be a complex and substantial undertaking. It could lead to a reduction in the quality of service for people relying on that service during the transition period, and staff would worry about their futures. I am not sure quite what just putting them together would achieve. The key thing is to have expertise and effective ombudsman decisions, which we have increasingly seen in recent years.

[Lord Wallace of Saltaire (LD)]

My Lords, I had not realised until I went into the background of this Question that we have 20 different ombudsmen in the United Kingdom. Nor had I realised that one ombudsman deals with the health service and another one deals with social care, which seems to be not very well organised. Nor had I realised, furthermore, that you have to go through your MP if you want to go to the Parliamentary and Health Service Ombudsman. Does the Minister not think that there are a number of problems within the existing set-up that the Government ought at least to look at again?

[Baroness Neville-Rolfe (Con)]

As I said in my opening remarks, some changes we are able to look at, and we have made improvements. On the MP filter, which the noble Lord refers to, it is designed to help complainants. MPs are able to make confidential inquiries with officials or Ministers and resolve issues quickly. In addition to referring individual cases to be investigated by the ombudsman, they can raise issues publicly in the House of Commons. The ombudsman has a democratic element. It is a parliamentary creature and I think it helps to hold the Executive to account. Of course, the PACAC takes a great deal of interest and is responsible for the appointment of the ombudsman, who is a parliamentary officer.