Privileges and Conduct

Baroness McIntosh of Hudnall Excerpts

Thursday 15th November 2018 Lords Chamber

[Baroness McIntosh of Hudnall (Lab)]

My Lords, I, too, am not a lawyer and I venture into this space with great trepidation, having heard the speeches that have gone before, but the noble Lord, Lord Pannick, for whom I have the greatest respect—I mean that very sincerely—has moved an amendment which we are now discussing. The amendment tells us that it is his view that the commissioner failed in her duty. That is not the same as suggesting that our procedures are flawed. Our procedures may well be flawed, but that is not what we are debating.

What has occurred this morning and in the lead-up to this debate—the comment in the press and elsewhere—is that the commissioner is being traduced. What is being said of her is that either she is incompetent or she acted in bad faith. Both of those are very serious allegations—

[Noble Lords]

Oh!

[Baroness McIntosh of Hudnall]

Well, my Lords, I say that for this reason. It has not been put to us in the amendment that the Code of Conduct and the guidance that goes with it is flawed. That has been said by other speakers, but it is not in the amendment. The amendment says that the commissioner has failed to apply the Code of Conduct and the guidance that goes with it effectively and in accordance with the principles of natural justice and fairness.

If it is not said that the Code of Conduct is in itself flawed and therefore cannot be applied in that way, the fault appears to be hers and it therefore must be—must it not?—that she has applied it either because she is incompetent or knowing that she was applying it unfairly. That is a grave allegation to make against someone who this House has appointed to carry out its wishes in respect of a Code of Conduct which, we are now being told, is or may be flawed and is or may be in the process of being discarded. She could only apply the Code of Conduct before her at the time of the investigation.

Whatever the rights and wrongs of the case that she considered—like everyone else here, I am in no position, nor would I wish, to make any comment on that at all—it is, and I shall choose my words carefully here, perhaps regrettable that Members of the House have chosen to attack a public servant who is acting on its behalf when there is apparently no evidence that she acted either incompetently or in bad faith. For that reason, I must say that I cannot support the amendment of the noble Lord, Lord Pannick.

[Lord Eames (CB)]

My Lords, it is with degrees of trepidation that I take part in this debate, particularly as it is dominated by wonderful legal brains. My reason for speaking is that many years back now, I was asked by the then Leader of the House to lead the group that was to set up the Code of Conduct. In November 2009, our recommendations for the Code of Conduct were unanimously accepted by this House. Since then, with some technical adjustments, that code has remained in place and we have all lived with it, under it and, in a sense, for it. It is on a sad day—I use those words explicitly—such as this that we have to re-examine what we have accepted for many years. I am therefore in no way questioning what has been said in the amendment by my noble friend Lord Pannick, nor what has been argued by other lawyers. I want briefly to appeal to the House to remember that in the early stages of our current Code of Conduct, there was real anxiety on the part of the House that it should not become a lawyer’s charter and that we should avoid the adversarial approach to cases that were brought before us.

The background to that early production of a code was the self-regulation philosophy of your Lordships’ House. We have protected that and argued for it over the years, and it is something that we should be proud of and protect to the end as being one of the strengths of your Lordships’ House. So it was in those early days, when people argued that there would be occasions such as this when a case would be raised which would have something to do with the wording of the code, that we had to have some form in which we could avoid that adversarial approach or, I say again, the lawyer’s charter.

We came up with a phrase which has now endured all those years. It is simply put: personal honour. If you examine the wording of the report which we produced, and which still stands on page 4 of the Code of Conduct, you will see that we tried to analyse what personal honour means. We did so in ways and in words that I believe envelop individual cases, not least the case of the noble Lord, Lord Lester. In the list of the words that we have put in our report, we have covered virtually every incidence that could come before the Privileges Committee and then to this House; for example, selflessness, integrity, objectivity, accountability, openness and honesty are some of the words that we suggested. I am not referring to the individual facts of this case, but I am defending the Code of Conduct and our method of investigating issues such as this case, and appealing to the House to remember that the spirit of this House demands the degrees of honesty and consistency, which I submit is present in the way in which we operate the Code of Conduct in this House.