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Privileges and Conduct Committee: Fourth Report

My Lords, I beg to move that the fourth report from the Committee for Privileges and Conduct be agreed to. The House is being invited today to agree three reports from the Committee for Privileges and Conduct and three consequential suspension Motions. We are debating these reports together, which I hope will be convenient for the House, but I should emphasise that these are three separate reports, relating to three separate cases, and the Motions are entirely free-standing. On the other hand, the three suspension Motions are consequential upon agreement to the relevant reports, as they simply implement the committee’s main recommendation in each case. This is a difficult day for the House, and the task before us in considering these Motions is not one that I—or, I am sure, any noble Lord—will relish. It is made no easier by the fact that the contents of the reports now before your Lordships’ House were leaked to the media over the weekend in advance of publication. I can assure the House that we took all reasonable steps to prevent any leak, and I deeply regret that there was a leak, particularly in so far as it caused any distress to the three noble Lords who are the subjects of the reports. The three reports all relate to claims for expenses made under the Members’ reimbursement scheme. In each case the Member concerned designated one or more properties outside Greater London as his or her main residence and, as a result, claimed money under the night subsistence and travel expenses headings in the scheme. The key question in each case, which both the Sub-Committee on Lords’ Conduct and the Committee for Privileges and Conduct have considered in turn, is whether the Member correctly designated the property or properties in question as his or her main residence. I wish at this point to pay tribute to the members and staff of the Sub-Committee on Lords’ Conduct. They have taken on a vital, hugely difficult and, frankly, painful task. They have done their job with efficiency, rigour and fairness. I put on the record my personal thanks to the chairman, the noble Baroness, Lady Manningham-Buller, and her colleagues on the sub-committee. In the three cases before us, the sub-committee concluded, in each case, that the noble Lord concerned had wrongly designated the property in question as his or her main residence, and had wrongly claimed sums varying from £27,000, in the case of the noble Lord, Lord Bhatia, to £125,000, in the case of the noble Baroness, Lady Uddin. In each case the sub-committee concluded that the noble Lord concerned had made these claims in bad faith. All three noble Lords appealed against these findings to the Committee for Privileges and Conduct, which I chair. We considered the appeals on Monday 11 October. Our reports speak for themselves but it may be useful if I briefly summarise our most important conclusions, first on points of principle and finally on the specifics of each of the three cases. First, on the points of principle, we accept entirely the sub-committee’s conclusion that in each case money was wrongly claimed, and its calculations as to the amount of money wrongly claimed. However, we regard the repayment of this money as a matter of restitution rather than sanction, and therefore concluded that the length of suspension should not be linked to repayment. Secondly, the appeals contained a number of complaints as to the procedural fairness of the investigations. Although the sub-committee acted entirely properly throughout, and in full accordance with the procedure agreed by the House, we accepted that the procedure itself presents some difficulties. As we say in our report on the noble Baroness, Lady Uddin, there is a tension between ensuring that noble Lords under investigation enjoy appropriate procedural safeguards and preserving the informal and parliamentary nature of such proceedings. I believe that the House would not wish to turn internal disciplinary hearings into full-blown, adversarial court proceedings, with prosecution and defence lawyers and the cross-examination of witnesses. In fact, the House has explicitly agreed, more than once, that proceedings should be kept relatively informal. On the other hand, we need to ensure, in accordance with the principles of natural justice and fairness, that all evidence is properly tested and that no noble Lord is found guilty on the basis of hearsay. I should at this point remind noble Lords that these three investigations were all initiated in the previous Parliament, and so were conducted in accordance with the procedures agreed in December 2008. They are the last investigations to be conducted under these procedures. We now have a new Code of Conduct and a new set of procedures. The independent Commissioner for Standards, Mr Paul Kernaghan, will conduct any future investigations and present his findings to the sub-committee, which will, where appropriate, recommend a sanction to the main committee. This is, I believe, a better and clearer procedure. It separates the investigative and sentencing functions, and allows for an appeal against both elements to the main committee. The commissioner will have considerable freedom of action, and will be able to test all relevant evidence thoroughly. At the same time, I am sure that the sub-committee, along with the commissioner, will wish to reflect on the findings in these reports in the coming weeks, and consider whether our procedures could be improved still further. I now turn to the three cases. In each case we found that the so-called ““main residences”” designated by the noble Lords were not appropriately designated. They were properties outside London, designated as main residences by noble Lords who, before, during and after the periods in question, resided substantially inside London. They did not reflect any natural interpretation of the term ““main residence””. No entitlement to public money should have been claimed on such a basis. In the case of the noble Lord, Lord Paul, we disagreed, on the balance of probabilities, with the sub-committee’s conclusion that he had acted in bad faith in wrongly claiming amounts under the expenses scheme. However, as paragraph 8 of our report states, noble Lords have a duty to take reasonable steps to ensure that any money claimed from public funds is properly payable. We consider that the noble Lord, Lord Paul, was grossly irresponsible and negligent in this regard. For that reason, and bearing in mind that he repaid a total of £42,000 to the House at the start of the investigation, we recommend that he be suspended from the service of the House for four months. In the case of the noble Lord, Lord Bhatia, we dismissed his appeal and upheld the sub-committee’s finding that he wrongly claimed over £27,000, and that in so doing he did not act in good faith. In judging the relative severity of sanction in the noble Lord’s case, we took into account the relatively short period within which he made his claims, and the fact that, after receiving the sub-committee’s report and shortly before the committee met, he repaid the money to the House. However, he has not apologised or acknowledged that he acted wrongly. We therefore recommend that he be suspended from the service of the House for eight months. Finally, I turn to the sixth report, on the conduct of the noble Baroness, Lady Uddin. I have already indicated our concerns over the status of untested third-party evidence, such as the statements made to the police by her neighbours in Maidstone. We decided, after careful consideration and without intending any reflection on the quality of the evidence, that it would not be fair in her case to attach any weight to it. We then considered the noble Baroness’s own evidence, her letters, written statements, oral evidence and her appeal. It was clear to us that she had not advanced any reasonable interpretation of the term ““main residence””. As the sub-committee points out, in so far as she attempted to offer an interpretation, it was one in which the word ““main”” had no meaning. She chose, over a period of years, to designate as main residences properties which she repeatedly described as ““bolt-holes””. A bolt-hole is not a main residence, and the noble Baroness’s designations were wholly unreasonable. We therefore upheld the sub-committee’s finding that she wrongly claimed just over £125,000 over a four-year period, and that she should repay this money to the House. It will be for the Clerk of the Parliaments to arrange repayment. We further found that in making these claims, the noble Baroness, Lady Uddin, did not act in good faith. She has not acknowledged that she claimed the money wrongly; nor has she apologised in terms. In view of the length of time over which these claims were made, and the sums involved, we recommend that she be suspended from the service of the House for the remainder of the current Session of Parliament—in other words, until Easter 2012. In conclusion, we cannot ignore what has happened in these cases. It is clear that there was abuse of the Members’ reimbursement scheme and that the House has a duty to act in those cases where such abuse occurred. I therefore commend these three reports to the House.