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House of Lords: Code of Conduct

My Lords, as a member of the committee, perhaps I may briefly respond to the noble Lord, Lord Dear. I also pay tribute to the chairman and the clerk for their excellent work in producing the report. The noble Lord, Lord Dear, spoke of the "demeaning" possibility—I think that is the word he used—of every Member having to sign something when they take the oath and at the beginning of every Parliament to say that they will comply with the code of conduct. Members of the House, notably my noble friend Lord Grenfell, have raised serious points about the seriousness of this commitment. I very much welcomed the later intervention of the noble Lord, Lord McNally, to say that this was a small price to pay for public confidence, rather than that it was a small price in itself. Perhaps I may make one practical point about this suggestion, since it was discussed by the committee. Many of us do not have immediately in front of our minds every aspect of the code of conduct. I include myself in this, having been a Member of your Lordships’ House for 17 years. It has been very clear to me, in discussing the work and the outcome of the committee with various friends who are of my generation of Members of the House, from the beginning of the 1990s, that they certainly do not intend to break any aspects of the code of conduct. They certainly have no mal-intention towards it, but it is not something that they have actively considered for many years. One of the purposes of signing the code of conduct at the beginning of each Parliament would simply be to revive people’s memories of what it was that they were committed to in a practical way. I make one further practical point on that question. I think it says explicitly in the commentary on the report that we asked the Clerk of the Parliaments—and he has agreed—to look at how this could be implemented in a way that is consistent with the formality of taking the oath. I do not speak for all members of the committee because we did not explicitly discuss this, but I do not necessarily see this as part of the ceremony of taking the oath at the beginning of a Parliament. It could, for example, be done at the same time, but outside the Chamber. It does not necessarily have to be involved in the ritual that the noble Lord, Lord Stoddart of Swindon, quite rightly described in relation to the Writ. That issue was remitted to the Clerk of the Parliaments. I make those two practical points in order to put some context around the concerns that noble Lords, including the noble Lord, Lord Dear, have raised about signing a declaration of this kind.