Standards in Public Life

Lord Young of Cookham Excerpts

Thursday 9th September 2021 Lords Chamber

[Lord Young of Cookham (Con)]

My Lords, I compliment the noble Lord, Lord Blunkett, on his choice of subject and the way he introduced it. He demonstrated that this topic is best discussed in your Lordships’ House, rather than the other place. My experience there was that the exchanges resulted in the political currency being debased, as each party tried to portray its rivals as the more corrupt and the collective reputation of politicians was further tarnished. Here, we are an offshore island to the mainland of political controversy. We benefit from Cross-Benchers, not least the chairman of the Committee on Standards in Public Life; and the politicians taking part are, for the main, men and women whose reserves of partisan venom have been drained by the passage of time—although the noble Lord, Lord Wallace of Saltaire, still had a drop or two left.

Each speaker approaches this issue from their own perspective. In 1997, I thought I had the least attractive job in public life as Secretary of State for Transport, charged with privatising the railways in a Government with no majority. Then I became chairman of the Select Committee on Standards and Privileges in 2001, charged with enforcing the Code of Conduct for MPs, sitting in judgment on my colleagues and friends, and occasionally bringing their careers to an end. That was not why I became a Member of Parliament. My first point, from that experience, is to welcome the trend of removing politicians from decisions about their conduct and pay; I believe that process has further to go. There are now voting lay members on the committee I used to chair, but perhaps they could go further and have an independent chairman.

On the Ministerial Code, again, we need to go further. Gordon Brown appointed an adviser on ministerial standards in 2008, a post now held by the noble Lord, Lord Geidt, but he can suggest areas for investigation only privately to the PM. This falls short of what is required—namely, full discretion to launch inquiries, as with the Parliamentary Commissioner for Standards, along with the ability to publish findings in full.

Related to that are decisions on pay and allowances. Again, these decisions should be distanced from beneficiaries. Here, I make a suggestion which will not be greeted with acclaim. Normally, your Lordships’ House is ahead of the other place on internal reform—televising proceedings and having iPads in the Division Lobby—but on pay and allowances I would argue that we lag behind. In 2010, the other place contracted out decisions on both to IPSA. It was a baptism of fire, as the organisation was set up at speed and made mistakes. Your Lordships decided not to join, and I understand why, but now we are the only national body that fixes its pay and allowances. IPSA has been up and running for over 10 years; it has authority, credibility and experience of fixing pay and allowances for parliamentarians. The annual controversy over MPs’ pay has been largely defused.

I happen to think that our present system of allowances is our Achilles heel, generating bad publicity and unfair on those who do not have a home in London, but we are too terrified to risk controversy and change it. We should follow the other place and contract out. To those who think that IPSA would dress us in hair-shirts, the evidence points otherwise. Since I joined this House in 2015, our allowance has gone up from £300 to £313, or by 4.3%. Over the same period, that of MPs has risen from £67,060 to £81,932, an increase of 22.2%.

I move on to what I hope is safer territory to make a final point. While there are no grounds for complacency, I believe standards in public life here are among the highest in the world. Nicolas Sarkozy, the former President of France, has been sentenced to three years in jail, two of them suspended, for corruption. Silvio Berlusconi, the former Prime Minister of Italy, was convicted of tax fraud in an Italian court and sentenced to four years’ imprisonment. Jacob Zuma, former President of South Africa, is now in prison for contempt of court and facing trial for corruption. Ex-President Trump was impeached twice, and he and his company face a range of civil and criminal actions while, in 2018, the ex-President of Brazil, Lula da Silva, was the front-runner for the presidency, even though he was in jail serving a 12-year corruption sentence. So yes, we can do better; but we are not bottom of the class.