---

Local Government and Public Involvement in Health Bill

My Lords, I welcome the Government’s amendments, which will bring clarity to private conduct. Noble Lords may remember my expressing in Committee grave reservations about the current situation, where the private conduct of a councillor could be treated in such a way as to result in their suspension from office and all that that entails, whereas were they a private citizen it would result in no action being taken. I know that the human rights committee had expressed concern that that situation was possibly contrary to human rights legislation. I used in Committee the analogy of the courts martial system, which has come in for criticism in Europe for introducing a quasi-legal framework and sanctioning individuals for offences which, were they to be committed by someone who was in another profession, would not be prosecuted. Councillors should not be treated as a separate species, so I am glad to see that private conduct is to be removed from the code. The difficulty that we now face is how we draft legislation that deals with criminal conduct. Like the noble Baroness, Lady Hanham, I am concerned about framing the amendment with the expression ““would constitute a criminal offence””. How might the procedure work? Does the ethical standards regime kick in after the court has decided that someone is guilty of a criminal offence? In that case, ““would constitute”” are not the right words for the legislation. I suspect that ““would constitute a criminal offence”” is in the Bill because an individual who is charged with a criminal offence and is going through the legal process would remain a councillor until found guilty, which in a sense is right because we are all supposed to be innocent until proven guilty. However, I suspect that people in a locality would find it difficult to be represented by an individual who had been charged with, for example, child pornography. We have reached a difficult point. When a councillor is suspended from office, it is serious not just for the individual but also for the area that they represented. How do we deal with that situation while the legal process is going on?