House of Lords Conduct Committee: Code of Conduct Review

Baroness Barker Excerpts

Tuesday 8th October 2024 Grand Committee

[Baroness Barker (LD)]

My Lords, my reason for taking part in the debate today is that over the past three or four decades in my professional life, which was in the charity sector, I had experience of advising complainants who believed that they had been subject to inappropriate behaviour or abuse. I advised defendants who were accused of such activities, and I have also advised boards of trustees who had before them both those groups of people and had to implement grievance and disciplinary processes to come to a judgment. Ever since I started to do that more than 30 years ago, I noted the toll it took on everybody involved, not least those whose professional lives were in jeopardy. I have been interested to watch that process happen in different organisations in different sectors—in the public sector and in the private sector too. It is one of those things where, when something occurs that you hear about on the news, you find yourself listening to it and going back to the sorts of questions that you had to deal with many years ago.

I was interested in what the noble Lord, Lord Evans of Weardale, said about issues being different in different organisations. I do not think they are. The issues are always much the same. The details and the context may well be very different and have a very different bearing on the judgment that people make. What is considered to be bringing one organisation into disrepute is very different from what brings another one into disrepute. His point about the role of professional codes of conduct was important. I observe that we do not have a professional code of conduct in this House. We rely on, in the current wording, our “personal honour”. I will turn to that in a minute.

My experience in all the cases I was involved in led me to a clear belief that what is needed in any organisation is a system that is robust, that can investigate matters as and they arise to resolve matters so that everyone can work in the organisation without fear and to their full potential, and that is timely and clearly understood. It is important that it is there before an issue arises and is not hurriedly cobbled together as an issue arises. Most complaints and grievance processes, which is what this essentially is, evolve over time. I therefore think that it is important that we have this debate on a periodic basis to make sure that our code keeps up to date.

It is important that we note this afternoon that we are Members and have the enormous privilege of saying publicly what we think about this code, but this code is important to our staff, and they do not have it. We have heard cases made vociferously this afternoon about individual Members who have felt hard done by, by this code, but we have never heard the other side of the story. One thing that I learned from decades of dealing with these things is that there are always two sides of a story, and what matters is the process which is gone through and the judgments that arise.

Processes such as this are very easy targets. They are very often very easy to take apart, and there has been a flavour of that today. You can seize on particular details and score cheap points. What matters is whether they work in practice. Looking back over the history set out for us in great detail by the noble Lord, Lord Skidelsky, we can say that our processes have worked and have brought about, for staff and Members, an improved environment in which we can all work.

Others may disagree with that, but that is the purpose of this. I think that for the majority of Members, and certainly for a lot of members of staff, it has been an important thing. It is very easy to have a go, and we do when these matters occur. It occurred only this morning on the “Today” programme, where somebody was talking about being abused by a teacher many years ago. I am really pleased that over the past 30 years, young people at work are no longer having to put up in silence with the sort of behaviour that I had to many years ago. They have done that only because—it always follows the same pattern—somebody has to be brave enough to speak up about the existing culture in which they work and to point out the damage.

I listened to Members being outraged about the idea of compulsory training. I look back particularly to my experiences in the workplace, and it was always the people who were most hostile to that who were always terribly surprised to find out that they had in fact been doing things which were greatly offensive or harmful to other people. My experience of being on training courses which were put on in this House was that the majority of people who went on them—and maybe people who did not—learned quite a lot from them and were very grateful. They came out of the room having thought very differently about matters from when they went in and some of them, such as the noble Lord, Lord Balfe, did not feel so worried about talking to members of staff afterwards because they felt that they had gone through the training and they had a greater understanding.

I make one plea to the noble Baroness, in so far as she has any influence, which is that she does not listen to the siren calls about that and to make sure that the training is there. One of the biggest and most important things about a code of conduct is that it is there for protection and for protection against vexatious claims. I have had them made against me, and I have also been involved in defending somebody in the House of Commons from a vexatious claim. The fact that our code was explicit in many ways helped in both of those cases.

I agree with the noble Lord who said that what we say in the Chamber has to be protected. I wish that many of the people who sit in the Chamber and make some of the statements that they do would think more profoundly about the effect that they might be having on other people.

I want to finish with just two observations. In all sorts of areas of life, attitudes to work and the expectations of people who go to work have changed. That is for the better. The more I listen to people coming forward and talking about horrible things that happened to them as individuals in the workplace, the more I think it is a good thing, and we should encourage that, and we do encourage that for other groups. More to the point, in this place we not only criticise other people but legislate about other professions: the Metropolitan Police, doctors and all the rest of them. Therefore, it is more important than ever that we have a process for ourselves and that we apply it to ourselves in a way that meets the highest of standards, and that includes transparency and having input from individuals who sit on the board. They are not random individuals who are put there for no reason; they sit on the board because they have relevant experience and advice to bring to it.

I simply point out that this is a protection not just for us but for our staff, and if we do things well, we have nothing to fear. I hope that the noble Baroness, Lady Manningham-Buller, will convey to her committee that, while it has not been the tenor of the debate today, a lot of us believe that this is very important and we do not want to go back, ever.