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Standards of Conduct in Public Life

Not for the first time, my hon. Friend anticipates a point that I was going to make. Indeed, much of life on the Public Administration Committee is taken up with him doing just that, and his contributions are always extremely valuable. I was coming to precisely that point—that it is not much good to have an elaborate system of ethical regulation if it does not have a voice, or if people do not know that it exists. Following the report that we are discussing today, the Committee convened a seminar of all the ethical watchdogs. It was very interesting, but the consistent theme that emerged was that they all believed that they were lacking a champion. The spokesmen for the bodies involved all told us that they did not feel that anyone was there to champion all the good work being done. The fact that that is what we were told emphatically makes the point raised by my hon. Friend the Member for Pendle (Mr. Prentice), and it is something to which we must turn our attention. At the heart of the Committee's interest, and its recommendations, is the fact that it robustly tries to seek solutions to the problems it identifies. That is its hallmark. The Committee is not complacent about standards and conduct, and tries always, in various ways, to strengthen the arrangements. In our report, we argue that the time has come to recognise explicitly that we have created a system of permanent ethical regulation. I have described an array of bodies: they are not here today and gone tomorrow; they are here to stay. As a political system, we have committed ourselves to having standing machinery to regulate conduct in public life. The problem is that the bodies are often set up in an ad hoc way. In response to a passing crisis, what do we do? We set up a new body, a new commissioner or a new committee. That means that the complete network of such bodies lacks a coherent institutional design. We think it is time to remedy that. There is a rather important constitutional point: if we are serious about the permanent ethical regulation of public life we have to be serious about the status of the bodies that engage in it. The situation seems fundamentally unsatisfactory to us. Indeed, our report notes:"““It is unsatisfactory for the ethical regulators created to regulate government to be appointed by government, and funded by government.””" We have reached the point where we should express our commitment to the permanence of those bodies by putting them on a proper statutory foundation. Parliament wants to know that they are part of the permanent political landscape, so the Committee suggested the establishment of a public standards commission, which would be an umbrella organisation for the bodies that have been set up, and ensure that they all took a statutory form. The Government have not said that they accept our argument, but they have not rejected it either. In their response to our report, they say they will think about the proposals. Given the fact that we have had a number of successes with the Government recently and they are taking a great interest in our previous recommendations, we have some hope that when the constitutional reform Bill is drafted—that omnibus piece of legislation—a place will be found to do something of the kind that we propose. It would provide an explicit constitutional commitment to ensuring that bodies charged with the regulation of public life are permanent, independent and not simply creatures of Government. In fact, such bodies are not compromised in practice; they do excellent work and are robustly independent, but there is something unsatisfactory about their constitutional status and I think we can put that right. At the same time, we can give coherence to the system and perhaps answer the watchdogs' charge about the lack of a champion of their role in the overall system.