---

Privileges Committee: Second Report

My Lords, often, when I am showing people around this building, I say that I have worked here for more than 40 years and that I never enter it without a sense of awe for what it stands for, for what it is. As we are very close to the alarums of battle, I can also say, as one who is slightly to one side of it, something that I said yesterday. I think that this House has been very well served by the Leader of the House and the leader of the Opposition in the way that they have approached these very difficult circumstances. It would have been very easy for this to collapse into easy point-scoring on one side or another. The fact that we have progressed so far on this road is in no small measure due to the leadership that we have had from those two Front Benches. That is not drawing together in a common defence, but a real addressing by this House of the problems that we face. The vast majority of people in this House feel the sense of honour, duty and responsibility to which I referred. What we have had to come through has been extremely painful for many. I cannot remember which noble Baroness said at a very early stage, "For the first time, I came in this morning feeling ashamed of being in the House of Lords", because of some splash in one of the newspapers. We have come through it, thanks to the work of the committees, especially the noble and right reverend Lord, Lord Eames, and his committee, and the noble Baroness, Lady Manningham-Buller, and her committee. The Leader of the House's speech could well bear reading by the press, because it brought together very well the whole raft of reforms which are coming forward now to repair the reputation of this House. I shall not repeat that, but I will echo the plea made by the noble Lord, Lord Strathclyde. I know that some colleagues will feel that the request to sign up to the code of conduct is a "When did you stop beating your wife?" declaration, but we must realise that the mood outside needs clear demonstrations. Members may well feel the affront of being asked to sign such a declaration but, as the noble Lord, Lord Strathclyde, said, it is a fairly small price to pay for that outward show of determination to put our House right. On the use of facilities, we must remember that the outside use of facilities is also a subsidy. It would be almost impossible to run the facilities of this House commercially with the sitting days and the hours that we sit. The real clue—I again echo the noble Lord, Lord Strathclyde—is transparency. If we know who is booking what, the chances of abuse are scant. I hope that we do not put the shutters up on the use of facilities by outside organisations because it is one of the benefits of this House. The times, they are a-changin’. We cannot run the House in some of the comfortable ways that we have run it in the past, even though those ways were entirely innocent as well as being comfortable. We cannot just look at ourselves and have confidence in each other. We have to satisfy an external audience, and the work that we are putting in hand today goes some way to doing that.