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House of Lords: Code of Conduct

It is a great privilege to follow the noble and right reverend Lord, Lord Eames, who is held in such high regard in this House in general and on these Benches in particular. I commend him and the other members of the group for the quality and clarity of their report and pay tribute, as others have done, to the much missed Lord Kingsland, whose influence we can still feel in your Lordships' House. At the outset, I need to make clear that it was with some regret that it was not possible for a representative of the Bench of the Lords spiritual to give evidence to the committee’s deliberations. This should in no way be taken as a sign of any detachment on our part on the issue of revising the code or, heaven forbid, as a suggestion that we are above such things or that we are not committed to full involvement in the wider work of the House. Rather, it reflected nothing more than the process of the changing of the guard with regard to convenorship of the Bench. I hope that my contribution today will indicate the wide support of the Lords spiritual for the proposed reforms. Our view is that the report is thorough, reasonable and measured. It strikes the right balance between respecting the self-regulating nature of the House and the stock placed in the personal honour of its Members on the one hand and the need to overhaul the oversight and transparency procedures on the other. As other noble Lords have done, I underline the significance of several points in particular. The first is the importance of a shortened code outlining the principles of conduct and the more detailed guidance offered to support it. The second is the placing of the emphasis in the code on what your Lordships’ House does, rather than on what its Members are prevented from doing. We particularly welcome the specific inclusion in paragraph 1 of the code of the statement of what the House does and its relation to the public interest. The third is the suggestion that a post of independent commissioner for Lords standards be created, and the fourth is the incorporation of the principles of the Committee on Standards in Public Life into the code. The fifth is the group’s conclusion that a statutory commissioner or register would be a disproportionate step—effectively, an overreaction to some isolated incidents of abuse, which are, lest we all forget, very much against the grain. Lastly, there is the emphasis on personal integrity, honour and the need for Members at all times to be acting in the public interest. I draw particular attention to one or two detailed points. First, will the noble Baroness the Leader be able to confirm the position of the Lords spiritual in relation to the paid-advocacy rule in paragraph 14 of the new code? The Church of England might be seen by some to be involved in advocacy in a number of areas—for example, in education and social care—and therefore it might be possible to see the bishops as paid advocates, people placed in this House by virtue of our office, for which we receive a stipend from another body. Will that clause affect the ability of the Lords spiritual in their important advocacy role in this House? Secondly, we need to be careful to ensure that we strike an appropriate balance between regulation and the need to take proper account of public opinion. Anyone following debates in another place might feel that the court of public opinion has tended to overstep its authority and that there is a risk of the pendulum swinging too far. Introducing a new requirement for Members of this House to sign the code of conduct at introduction and at the start of each Session, to underline each Member’s obligation to abide by its principles, may be considered by some as unnecessary but it surely gets the balance right with regard to regulation and public reassurance. Some of your Lordships may have noticed recently the number of new Members joining the Bishops’ Bench. This Bench is committed not only to observing the highest standards of probity when exercising its function within the House but also to be seen to be doing so. To that end, many new Members and some older ones may be concerned that they do not, by omission rather than intention, find themselves on the wrong side of the rules. Although we have a new parliamentary unit in place to help guide and advise the Lords spiritual on expenses, the Register of Lords’ Interests, and so on, many Bishops’ offices find it difficult to get their heads around what is required of them and their Bishops. I make a plea, therefore, for as much clarity as possible when issuing future guidance. I should like to make two final short points. First, no one should be in any doubt that the need for the new code and the events that prompted its revision should not in themselves necessarily signify a need for a wider reform of this House. I took the opportunity to set out the views of this Bench on that issue during the debate on the gracious Speech. Secondly, we welcome the group’s discussion in part 1 of the report, at paragraph 29, of the concepts of personal honour and integrity and its conclusion that nothing in the new code ought to replace or undermine the well-established principle of self-regulation or the assumption that Members act with integrity. The guide makes it clear that Members ought to be expected to act at all times in full accordance with the spirit as well as the letter of the rules and this, surely, is of fundamental importance. When the MPs’ expenses issue was first breaking news, the most reverend Primate the Archbishop of Canterbury wrote an article for the Times, from which, with your Lordships’ permission, I would like to quote: ""In recent months, we've had a number of examples … of people saying when challenged that ‘no rules were broken’. Some of the initial responses to public anger about MPs' expenses have amounted to much the same thing. And this suggests a basic problem in our moral thinking. The question, ‘What can I get away with without technically breaching the regulations?’ is not a good basis for any professional behaviour that has real integrity.""Integrity is about what we value in ourselves or our work for its own sake—what's worth making sacrifices for, what we're glad to have done simply for the kind of act it is. If I do something just because I'm told to, or if I hold back from something simply because of fear that I shall be caught out, it's a very different business. It has nothing to do with that sense of being glad to have done something. And without that sense, no-one is really going to see public life as a vocation in the old-fashioned meaning of the word—a task you perform because you find yourself in the doing of it.""Without that sense, we always slip back towards to the shabby calculation of what we can get away with. ‘No rules were broken’: I may have done something that is manifestly against the spirit of the rules or regulations, but technically I'm safe, even if I haven't even begun to think through from the inside what kind of person I've been making myself; what the cost is to my moral health, the person I am"." It is because this code does much to secure the moral health of this House that it is warmly supported by these Benches.