Conduct Committee

Lord McConnell of Glenscorrodale Excerpts

Tuesday 3rd November 2020 Lords Chamber

[Lord McConnell of Glenscorrodale (Lab)]

My Lords, I thank the noble and learned Lord, Lord Mance, for introducing the report and very eloquently explaining why these recommendations are in front of us today. I will ask two questions and make one additional point. I hope these are all helpful.

First, I strongly support the recommendation in the first part of the report that this should be a subject for the Code of Conduct. I look forward to the implementation of action for those who do not want to take part in this training. I wanted to ask about paragraph 11, where there is a reference to

“restricting their access to certain services”

for Members of your Lordships’ House who face investigation, having not attended this training by the end of March next year. I wondered which services would be the subject of that restriction and whether it would include the ability to employ staff on the Parliamentary Estate, which seems fundamental if someone is not attending training in relation to bullying or other bad behaviour?

My second point on that first part of the report is that, during the discussion to which I was party on the Valuing Everyone training, there was a specific discussion about the situation faced by individual members of staff of individual Peers, who are very vulnerable because they do not have access to managers or supervisors, particularly if there are different members of staff sharing the same offices. If they have problems between themselves, there is no system in your Lordships’ House for dealing with those difficulties; there is no one arbitrating or discussing with those involved how to resolve any differences that are occurring.

I have raised this a number of times with senior figures in both main parties and the House, and we do not yet have a resolution or a system for dealing with this. Since our training session, I have discussed it with the human resources department. I hope they are going to take some of these points on board and that, in looking at this issue, the committee will look at the impact of the training and the issues that are coming out of and arising from it, which could be tackled. I hope that at some stage, perhaps, it will prepare a report on the lessons that have been learned and the action that has been taken.

My second question relates to the second part of the report. Again, I strongly support the recommendations here: they are excellent and well thought through. I wanted to ask a specific question about the situation with Members who will serve, or have served, in the devolved Parliaments. This section of the report covers Members who have served in either the House of Commons or the House of Lords and have transferred between them.

However, there have been a number of Members of the House of Lords who have then gone on to serve in the devolved Parliaments and, increasingly, previous Members of the devolved Parliaments who have come to serve in the House of Lords. I wonder whether the committee has ever looked at that issue or would be prepared to look at it and some relationship between the devolved Parliaments and your Lordships’ House in the future, where issues of conduct could be considered by either House in order to make sure that nobody falls through the cracks?