House of Lords Conduct Committee: Code of Conduct Review

Baroness Noakes Excerpts

Tuesday 8th October 2024 Grand Committee

[Baroness Noakes (Con)]

My Lords, it is a pleasure to follow the noble Lord, Lord Skidelsky. Unfortunately, he has stolen some of my thunder, as I was going to go through some of the history of the evolution of the Code of Conduct. I will cover a little of it but will attempt not to repeat what he said.

I welcome this debate, but it is sad that only 12 noble Lords have opted to take part, although perhaps encouraging that others have stayed to listen. It would have been better to see greater involvement.

[Baroness Manningham-Buller (CB)]

Quite a lot of Peers, not all of them here today, have put in written submissions and have been doing so since spring. If noble Lords chose not to come today or preferred the very interesting things happening next door, it may be because they have already sent us a note, of which we have had quite a few.

[Baroness Noakes (Con)]

I accept that point. The choice of the Government to put the debate in this Room may well have affected the willingness of noble Lords to take part, because putting it here usually says “not so important” to noble Lords.

The code has become a monster and we need to do something about it. Like the noble Lord, Lord Skidelsky, when I joined the House there was no Code of Conduct. We managed perfectly well with the rather minimal rules of declaration of interests and very light-touch registration of interests. We had the two foundational principles that Peers should always act on their personal honour and should never accept any financial inducement for exercising parliamentary influence. That served us well.

I had not been in the House very long before we acquired our first Code of Conduct. We got it back in 2000 because the Committee on Standards in Public Life decided to have a look at whether the House of Lords should have a code of conduct. It fully accepted that there was no scandal or issue leading to the suggestion that we needed one, but nevertheless recommended that we have one. The rationale, so far as one was given, appeared to be that, because other legislators and organisations had codes of conduct, we should have one too. That, as far as I can see, is the only reason why we started to have one.

As the noble Lord, Lord Skidelsky, reminded us, in the wake of the “cash for amendments” scandal and, in timing terms, in alignment with the MPs’ expenses scandal, it was decided that something more should be done. It is said that hard cases make bad law. I must say, I think that media-based scandals make rotten rules; that is one reason we have got stuck with a Code of Conduct that does not seem to work for a lot of people.

We got to 2010, and we had those scandals. We had the feeling that we had to show public penance—that is, we had to wear hair shirts and do things. Self-regulation, which is a defining principle of the way in which we run our affairs in this House, partially went out the window when we started to get outsiders in, first in relation to the Commissioner for Standards then later in relation to the Conduct Committee. I regret that we went down that route because I could see no necessity for it.

I turn to the code. When the Committee on Standards in Public Life decided that we should have one, it said that it needed to be only a short code, which I think was probably a recognition that we did not really need one at all. I have not been able to track down a digital or physical copy of that first code, so I do not know how long it was, but it was certainly shorter than the version that appeared in 2010; the noble Baroness, Lady Manningham-Buller, said that that one was 28 pages. The earlier one was certainly shorter because, looking at the debates around the time of the 2010 revision, there was a great desire from people to show that they were doing things—that they had to have more rules, more penalties and, ultimately, more pages. We now have a code that is double that length; it particularly grew when the behaviour code and the infamous appendix B was added.

It should also be said that 2010 was the time when all noble Lords were compulsorily obliged to waste their time and taxpayers’ money on the completely useless course on the behaviour code. I agree with what the noble Baroness, Lady Fox, and the noble Lord, Lord Skidelsky, said about this. There should be no reason for any compulsion; I include in that the requirement for new Peers to attend the course.

The two foundational principles remain valid and cover everything that is relevant. We should question whether these 56 pages add to or detract from those principles. My own view is that the usefulness of the code in guiding Members’ behaviour is inversely related to its length. The mass of detail in the code conceals the underlying principles, in effect; I do not think that it enhances the effectiveness of the code to have so much detail in it. I encourage the committee to go back to basics when looking at revising the code. It should not be just a question of making small amendments here and there; it should be about going back to asking what we absolutely need to put in it and what can be relegated somewhere else or dealt with in another way.

When God gave Moses the 10 commandments, they were written on two tablets. In modern day parlance, I think that is roughly equivalent to one side of A4. Moses did not think that it was necessary to add any more tablets, another 50 or 100, of detailed rules to underpin the 10 commandments. The 10 commandments have endured and are well understood, but I am not sure that the same can be said of the Code of Conduct. I hope that the committee will take as a style guide the conciseness with which the 10 commandments are expressed and the lack of need to embellish them with unnecessary detail.

In addition to focusing the code back more clearly on its roots, and the focus on the underlying principles, I hope that the committee will look at whether material not directly related to the Code of Conduct can be removed. I am not at all clear why the Code of Conduct for Members includes a Code of Conduct for Members’ staff. That could be dealt with elsewhere, in a way that is accessible to Members’ staff. That is only three pages—but there are 14 or 15 pages about enforcement. I query whether a document intending to deal with the Code of Conduct should have in it detailed rules about how complaints are dealt with. That is a separate issue from the Code of Conduct and can be safely put in another document.

I can just about live with the page of motherhood and apple pie of the behaviour code in the first appendix, but the extraordinary detail in appendix B, which we heard about from the noble Baroness, Lady Fox, is certainly not necessary to Members of this House and exposes this House to ridicule. There is one good place to put the five pages of appendix B, and it is not at the back of the Code of Conduct.

I shall focus my remarks primarily on the issue of the broad approach to the code—that is, that it should be more principles based and less detail based, focused on essentials. I would like to cover some specific additional aspects. First, I very much regret the fact that the rules introduced about declaring earnings from clients that are foreign Governments led to several noble Lords taking leave of absence. Those of us who had careers in professions that regard client confidentiality as sacrosanct were frankly appalled by them. I am not convinced that the benefit of those rules stands up to scrutiny; they are certainly worth revisiting.

Secondly, I do not think that the rules that govern how the commissioner handles complaints meet the rules of natural justice that the Code of Conduct itself requires. The commissioner is the investigating policeman and the prosecutor but also the judge and jury. The accused Member does not have effective legal representation in the sense that he does not have a person who is able to put a case for the Member.

All that is justified on the basis that the proceedings are inquisitorial rather than adversarial in nature. I have talked to several noble Lords who have been caught up in the process of having a complaint against them. Whether they are guilty or not, I do not think that they share that analysis—that it is a mere inquisitorial process. They all find it extremely stressful; it goes on for a very long time, and many still bear the scars a long time after the process has completed. Lives have certainly been ruined by judgments being reached on the balance of probabilities. We really need to look again very carefully at the procedure for handling complaints.

Lastly, although it is not my final concern with the rules—but I have rationed myself to three for the purposes of today’s debate—I very strongly believe that we should not extend our code to activities outside Parliament. The requirement to act on personal honour effectively covers egregious matters that can bring the House into disrepute. The most egregious examples have been effectively dealt with by the House without formally extending the rules into private activity. I am absolutely clear that we must not open the floodgates to vexatious complaints based on private beliefs and private activities.