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Privileges Committee: Second Report

My Lords, I shall make a historical reference. In case some of your Lordships are not aware of the earlier history, I came into the House at the end of 1997 and had just been appointed as the second chairman of the Committee on Standards in Public Life. Our first report was about how elections should be conducted and money provided to the parties. The second one was about your Lordships’ House because at that time, in 1999, there was concern that the House of Lords rules seemed to be laxer than and not as enforced as those down the Corridor. There was a feeling that all was not well. When I was introduced into that situation, I had four separate meetings where I was invited to address all the parties and the Cross-Benchers. Without disclosing any confidences, I can say that there was not unanimous enthusiasm for the role that I was trying to urge upon Members of your Lordships’ House; indeed, there were quarters where one might almost say that voices of dissent were heard. It would have been inconceivable in 1999 that two documents like today’s could have come before the House of Lords. They would have been turned down, and the attitude would have been wholly different from the responses, such as nodding, that it is getting around the House today. The House is behind these documents. It wants them to be put in place and voted upon, and I fully agree with that. My only word of warning relates to how we have got to the position that we are in. There has been a gradual shift in opinions during the decade from 2000 to 2010. Then we had these terrible cases that seemed to start in another place but effectively came to include Members of this House. The allegations that were made, if true, were serious and deeply disturbing. One asked oneself: how could any Member of this House have indulged in the alleged conduct? Now, not all the cases have been taken to trial, as it were. Two cases that were judged by committees of your Lordships’ House have been dealt with and led to penalties. Other cases have not had judgment, and I think that one should apply the ordinary rule that a man or woman is deemed innocent until proved guilty by due process, which has not been fully carried out. Nevertheless, allowing common sense to intrude, one’s suspicion has to be that some of what one read was true. That is deeply worrying. My only message for the future is that there must be some recognition in the House that this has to be watched. We cannot wait for another torrent of media revelations to get us into the right frame of mind. How exactly that will be done, I do not know, but it is an important consideration that we should keep in mind.