House Committee

Lord Laming Excerpts

Tuesday 20th December 2011 Lords Chamber

[Lord Hunt of Kings Heath]

My Lords, I thank the noble Lord the Chairman of Committees for introducing the report from the House Committee this afternoon. It is with regret that we have to revisit an issue that has done great damage to the reputation of your Lordships’ House in relation to money wrongly claimed under the system of financial support for Members.

The public interest and reputation of Parliament require that these matters are dealt with in as rigorous a way as possible. A number of Members of your Lordships’ House have found themselves subject to investigations—in some cases by the authorities and in some cases by the relevant mechanisms of your Lordships’ House. In a small number of cases Members of this House have been suspended. In two cases, investigation by the authorities has led to prosecution and custodial sentences. The House has had, through a very, very difficult period, to consider the adequacy of its mechanisms. Changes have subsequently been made, both to the system of financial support for Members and to the code of conduct governing membership of your Lordships’ House. I pay tribute to the work of those involved in dealing with these matters. I believe the rules produced and decisions reached were sensible. They are worthwhile provisions and have been of benefit to the House during a very difficult period for Parliament as a whole, including this House.

My noble and learned friend Lady Scotland, with her customary eloquence, has put forward a number of very serious points this afternoon. The noble Lord, Lord Pannick, made the point that suspension of a Member of Parliament from this House under any such Motion would be for the lifetime of the Parliament, and a further Motion would have to be brought at the beginning of the next Parliament. I understand the point my noble friend has made in relation to retrospective provision. Noble Lords will always be very wary of retrospective legislation and rightfully so, but there is, in effect, a different interpretation in the report before us today from the House Committee. That has identified a gap that needs to be filled. The sixth report from the Committee for Privileges and Conduct in October 2010 stated that the recovery of money wrongly claimed was not a disciplinary matter and not a matter for the committee. However, as the noble Lord the Chairman of Committees stated in his opening statement in that report:

“We therefore recommend that it is for the Clerk of the Parliaments, as Accounting Officer, consulting the House Committee as necessary, to consider what arrangements with Lady Uddin may be necessary to secure repayment of this sum to the House”.

In essence, the House Committee has now brought forward its advice in the form of an invitation to this House to agree a clear principle that a Member should not return to the House while still owing money. In the end, that principle is in the public interest. I cannot disagree with it and I will be supporting the recommendation of the House Committee.

[Lord Laming]

My Lords, I will not detain the House for more than a few minutes because I support the Motion that is before it. The House will know that I have been a member of the relevant committees for only a relatively short time, but I bring to them many years, sadly, of experience of dealing with disciplinary matters in the public services. Sad to say, that experience has taught me that these matters often involve conflict and sometimes considerable distress, which is made more serious when the people involved may be known to us personally.

However, I have an overriding impression of the way in which the House Committee has dealt with this matter and I support entirely the comments made by the noble Lord, Lord Baker, in saying that the committee has approached this matter from the point of view of principle, not from that of personality. It has gone out of its way to try and be fair, but every Member of this House will know that being fair in these circumstances is not a simple matter. Of course, one wants to be fair to the individuals involved but there is also an issue of being fair to your Lordships’ House and, more than that, of being fair to the taxpayer. The money does not belong to your Lordships’ House; it belongs to the taxpayer and it should be returned to the taxpayer.

Over the years, sad to say, I have dealt with many instances when taxpayers’ money has been wrongly claimed. The first responsibility of any organisation dealing with matters of this kind, particularly a public organisation, is to seek to recover the money—and to seek to do that recognising that it has to make a decision in the circumstances in which it now finds itself. I believe that the House Committee has both been reasonable in these matters and adopted a stance which tries to be fair and to reflect the seriousness with which the public would view this situation if we did not endeavour to recover the money. This does not imply permanent suspension from the House. I commend the Motion to the House because I believe that it is a reasonable, fair and sensible course of action to take.

[The Chairman of Committees]

My Lords, perhaps the House feels that we should come to a conclusion on this matter now. I feel a little daunted in facing the first three noble and learned Lords who spoke in the debate, particularly the noble and learned Baroness, Lady Scotland, but I am glad to say that some of the points that were made have already been answered by other noble Lords.

On the question of retrospectivity, which the noble Lord, Lord Pannick, answered very well, this is not retrospective because the sanctions agreed by the House last year related to the original breach of the expenses scheme. The House is today being asked to approve the principle that any Peers who subsequently fail to repay the money which they have been found to owe should be suspended for that reason and that reason alone. I should say to the House that this is a report in generality, not a report about any particular Peers, so I rather regret that a number of names have been mentioned at this stage. That may or may not come up later; as the report says, a further Motion will have to be moved in the new year.

The second point related to the Privileges and Conduct Committee. It is true that that the committee did not believe that the length of suspension which it recommended should be determined by reference to repayment and that it rejected the idea of an indefinite suspension. However, the House Committee’s proposals to suspend Members until they have repaid is not a second punishment for abusing the system. It is related to the failure to repay, which falls within the remit of the House. Neither is it an indefinite or permanent suspension; what we propose is a carefully defined suspension that can be ended as soon as the Member in question pays up.

Moreover, we are not thwarting the writ of summons because, as the noble Lords, Lord Pannick and Lord Alderdice, said, at no point would we be suspending a Member for a period longer than the remainder of the Parliament. A further suspension early in the following Parliament would be a separate suspension, not a continuation of the earlier one. As a number of noble Lords have said, it may be that we should legislate in future for longer than that but that would need new primary legislation.