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House of Lords: Code of Conduct

My Lords, in three and a half hours we have heard 29 speakers and it would not be useful to comment on them all. What has been absolutely clear is the general tenor of support for the work of the committee led by the noble and right reverend Lord, Lord Eames. I see no reason to take a different view. We asked these people to take on this piece of work and they have delivered it. This is now the right thing for us to take on. That is not to say that all sorts of concerns and hesitations have not been mentioned by many people during the debate. Perhaps I may refer to just two or three speakers. The noble and right reverend Lord, Lord Eames, said that signing an undertaking to abide by the code would be useful for new Peers. However, I think that it would also be a great reminder for old Peers that in each Parliament, as they enter this place, they undertake to abide by the code that their peers have set down for them. The noble and right reverend Lord, Lord Eames, also said that he was not interested in labels, whether one is talking about non-executive directors, consultants or employees. He then referred to the possibility of a non-executive director speaking to a group of directors about how Parliament works and their saying to him, "Can you help us further?", with the line perhaps being crossed. I think that the time has come to be blunt. Where will the line be crossed? It seems to me that the response from that non-executive director should be, "You’ll need to talk to someone else about it, not me". I suspect that that is the answer, but these practicalities need to be looked at. I thought that it was somewhat brave of the noble Lord, Lord Brooke of Alverthorpe, to go into detail about the position in which he found himself. It is worth pondering a little further on his comments. He talked about being salaried, which suggests that he was an employee. Some people used the word "consultant". My guess is that, had he been a non-executive director of the concern, these matters would not have arisen. There is a problem around the whole business of being a consultant, an employee or a non-executive director and it needs to be looked at seriously. There is something about the term "non-executive director" that suggests that a person who fills that role is somehow up and beyond and that clearly such people could not possibly be in any way money-grubbing or anything like that. Yet they have a greater responsibility to the firm than an employee or a consultant. It seems to me that that is still an area where not everything is absolutely clear. There is a simple way of looking at this issue. If you stand up to speak, write a letter or put down a Question and there is money in it for you that is directly attributable to doing that act, you should not do it. In my view, matters need to be set out with that sort of plainness and bluntness and I hope that some of it will appear in the guidance so that there is no doubt about what is right and wrong. With those few comments, I shall now be delighted to hear from the noble Baroness, or anyone else for that matter.