Parliamentary Democracy and Standards in Public Life

Lord Whitty Excerpts

Thursday 11th January 2024 Lords Chamber

[Lord Whitty (Lab)]

My Lords, as the final Back-Bench speaker, I will try to say something original. It is difficult, but I will try. Much of what has been said about the attitudes of the population to politicians and the political process is true. The noble Baroness, Lady Prashar, has just said that it is at an all-time low, which I am not sure is quite historically true. Even I was not here then, but the politicians of the 19th century were held in pretty low esteem, which is why we had the Great Reform Act, although that never fully affected the House of Lords. Nevertheless, at times we have had to change our system.

What has been missing from the debate is the fact that we have to recognise what is going on in society. It is true, as the noble Baroness, Lady Featherstone, and others have said, that some of the lack of respect for our system and individual parliamentarians is due to the mistakes of recent Administrations and recent scandals such as the Post Office one, but much of it is due to changes in society itself. Deference and respect are no longer there in society. It is easier to access all sorts of information thanks to changes in technology, the growth of social media and more scandal-orientated mainstream and social media. All of this means that issues which were never really known to the public have become very well known, sometimes exaggeratedly so. That societal change has its drawbacks, but by and large I approve of a society that is that sceptical and that questioning of its so-called betters.

What is lacking is an effective response by the legislature, in particular, to those changes in society and those questions which society now raises. The bodies that government and the legislature have set up are inadequate to meet these concerns. I note the description given by the noble Lord, Lord Pickles, of why ACOBA does not have adequate powers. I pay tribute to the noble Lord and his predecessor, the noble Baroness, Lady Browning, and to the staff who service the committee, on which I sat until last year, for all the systems that they have devised for making sure that potential jobs for retiring politicians and senior civil servants are not subject to corruption, potential corruption or the perception of corruption.

At the end of the day, ACOBA and the other bodies do not have the powers. Unless they are put fully on a statutory basis—let us say that those terms are written into the contractual terms of Ministers and senior civil servants—they will not have those powers. There will be no enforcement or penalties, and those sanctions need to be there. I hope that when we move to consider the constitution and indeed the reform of this Chamber, as I hope we will, we recognise that there is a special responsibility of the second Chamber, whatever its form, to ensure that the constitutional priorities as well as the personal priorities are met, and that there is a way of enforcing the standards in public life.