Standards in Public Life

Lord Norton of Louth Excerpts

Tuesday 4th February 2014 Lords Chamber

[Lord Norton of Louth (Con)]

My Lords, I too congratulate the noble Lord, Lord Bew, on initiating this important debate. I wish to make three short points. The first is that maintaining standards, as embodied in the Code of Conduct, is necessary, but it is not sufficient to establish high levels of trust in our political system. As is clear from the survey, we have some way to go to meet the necessary standards. However, ensuring compliance with the code should be seen as only part of the solution. What flows from the survey, and the Hansard Society’s annual Audits of Political Engagement, is that we should be pursuing both a bottom-up and a top-down approach to restoring trust.

The bottom-up approach is captured by one of the final sentences of the survey, on page 51:

“It also seems likely that perceptions of standards would respond to better public information about how different institutions try to ensure that they live up to the principles in public life”.

One of the problems is lack of understanding of the political process. Like the noble and right reverend Lord, Lord Harries, I believe it is necessary to bolster citizenship education. It is in the national curriculum, but there are no incentives for head teachers to take it seriously. We need to be ensuring that there are incentives, and resources, for schools to deliver it effectively. It is essential to the health of our political system.

However, ensuring that people are more informed about the system is no guarantee that it will enhance support for it. That will come when people recognise that politicians are acting in good faith to deliver on their promises. There is thus a major challenge for politicians in terms of behaviour. We need political parties to move away from empty partisanship and to get out of the Downsian cycle of outbidding one another. We need politicians to show leadership—the top-down approach—to lead from the front and not follow focus groups or the latest passing bandwagon. Margaret Thatcher pursued policies that were contentious, but her leadership style resonated. We need to be addressing these issues. It is easy to advocate constitutional reform, but that is a form of displacement activity. It is to suggest that the structure, rather than those who occupy it, is the problem. The problem is the people who occupy it. Once we accept that we are part of the problem— indeed, a central part—we can then start to tackle it.

My question to the Minister is straightforward: do you agree?