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Privileges Committee: First Report

My Lords, near the start of what will be a long debate, I shall, if I may, say a very few words about the point of law on which the noble and learned Baroness the Attorney-General and the noble and learned Lord, Lord Mackay, have expressed different views. They both agree that there is no power to exclude a Member permanently. They both agree that the House has power to regulate its own procedure. The only question that divides them is whether that power includes a power to suspend. The Attorney-General argues in paragraph 14 of her memorandum that the power to suspend is outside what she calls the mere regulation of our own procedures. In my view, the power to regulate our procedure goes wider than she implies. The House, like any other body, has power to make rules for its own governance. Like any other body, it must have power to enforce those rules. In the case of the most serious breaches, suspension for a limited period would seem to be the common-sense answer, unless that is excluded for some reason. The Attorney-General argues that it is indeed excluded because it is inconsistent with a Member’s right under his Letters Patent to sit and vote in Parliament. But that right is not absolute. It is a right that depends for its exercise on the Member receiving a Writ of Summons. The writ itself imposes certain duties on Members, including by implication a duty to obey the rules of the House. It follows, in my view, that the power of the House to impose sanctions for breach of its rules, including a power to suspend, exists and has always existed by necessary implication in the Writ of Summons. I would take that view even though that power may never have been spelt out until now, and even if it had never been exercised. The Attorney-General also argues that the power to suspend is excluded by a binding resolution of both Houses of Parliament in 1705. I am not sure in what sense that resolution can be said to be binding, having regard to the constitutional principle that no Parliament can bind its successors. Putting that on one side, I cannot agree that by asserting now a power to suspend Members for breach of the rules of the House, the House is thereby creating for itself a privilege in any ordinary or indeed, in any possible sense of that word. If it is creating a privilege it is, for all the reasons I have mentioned, not a new privilege. Finally, the Attorney-General draws attention to a view expressed by the then Clerk of the Parliaments in 1998 in evidence before the Joint Committee on Privileges. Any view coming from that source is entitled to the greatest respect. I have looked at that report and its predecessor, but we should not regard ourselves as being bound by that view, especially as the committee itself reached no conclusion one way or the other. It follows that I agree with the views more fully, and I suspect much more accurately, expressed by the noble and learned Lord, Lord Mackay, and summarised so well in paragraph 8 of the report. There is only one very small respect in which I would venture to disagree with the noble and learned Lord, when he says in paragraph 36 that he would expect the period of suspension for breach of the rules to be relatively short. He was not of course talking about this particular case, and nor am I. But I can imagine cases of a serious breach occurring near the beginning of a Parliament in which the suspension of the Member would be longer, perhaps very much longer, than is possible in these cases.