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Privileges Committee: Second Report

My Lords, I am delighted from these Benches to welcome these two reports and the clarity and transparency that they give in our dealings with one another and with the wider society. I am pleased, along with the noble Lord, Lord McNally, that the point is made in the facilities report that refreshment outlets can be used for raising money for charity. It is an important principle of our life together that we share our privileges with those in need and with other charitable causes. It is good to see that being affirmed in that report. I welcome the code of conduct and its guide for their specific clarity and, still more, for their refusal to confine and define our behaviour by a set of rules. Our signing the code with each new Parliament, which I very much welcome, will remind us of our solemn duties as Members of this House. I particularly welcome the development of the concept of personal honour, partly through our discussions in this House, expressed in paragraphs 6 to 8. Our daily prayers remind us of the need to lay aside all private interests, prejudices and partial affections. That phrase, which is very appropriate to the whole life of this House, is picked up in this code and its guide. There is a complex relationship between our personal sense of honour and the standards of the House as a whole. I was particularly interested to hear the Leader of the House taking that up in her introduction to this piece of business. It is well expressed in the balance between my own—or our own—deep convictions and those of the institution to which I am committed, a balance that applies not only to our membership of this House but to those other cultures of which we are a part, whether it is the British Medical Association, a county council, the Church of England or society as a whole. Personal integrity and communal allegiance must go together and I very much welcome the way in which the code and its guide deal with that. On a more specific issue, I am grateful for the clarification of the role of the Lords spiritual provided in paragraph 29, which is new, although I am also somewhat uncomfortable about it. The paragraph says that the Lords spiritual, along with Ministers of the Crown and members of non-departmental public bodies, are excluded in relation to those specific roles from the prohibitions on receiving payments for exercising parliamentary influence. I take it that that is a reference to our stipends as Church of England bishops, because, on a literalistic interpretation of the code, we could otherwise be excluded from contributing on matters of education or social care, for example. I would be grateful for confirmation from the Lord Chairman that it is our stipends that are being considered in paragraph 29. Apart from those, it is right that Lords spiritual should be bound by these provisions in just the same way as are other noble Lords. I suppose that it is one advantage of our curious dress code that this interest is at least fairly obvious when we contribute in this House. This code and its guidance ensure that we do not ever again fall into a culture where it is appropriate to argue that no rules have been broken. It will reinforce our moral integrity and remind all of us of the privilege of our service. I welcome it wholeheartedly.