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Privileges and Conduct Committee: Fourth Report

My Lords, this is a most uncomfortable and disagreeable business, but one from which this House must not, indeed cannot, shirk. I add my thanks on behalf of the Cross Benches to all officials and Peers alike who have been involved in bringing these reports to your Lordships’ House. Adherence to the code of conduct is a weighty personal responsibility. We in the Privileges and Conduct Committee have been obliged to judge our colleagues—a task that all of us would have preferred to avoid. However, the cases before us affect us all in many different ways. We are undoubtedly tainted by evidence of wrongdoing. The reputation of the House is at stake, which in turn affects the work that we do. The press, grossly duplicitous as it has been in some methods of investigation, has allowed—encouraged, even—the wider public to perceive this House and its work as redundant at best and unworthy of public funds at worst. We have to face these charges. We must acknowledge and never underestimate how we are now regarded; and we have to do something to redress the balance. Much has been achieved in recent months but part of the long journey back is how we respond to the report of the Committee for Privileges and Conduct before us today and the evidence contained therein. In arriving at our conclusions, the committee relied almost entirely on the evidence directly gained by the sub-committee’s, and our own, questioning, and not on press reports. Our findings uphold the sub-committee’s main conclusions with some adjustments to the recommended sanctions. In particular, we found that any acceptable or natural meaning of ““principal”” or ““main”” residence did not and could not apply in these cases no matter how generously the criteria are interpreted. Distasteful as it is, none of us here can ignore such evidence painstakingly developed by the sub-committee on noble Lords’ conduct, nor can we by our decisions minimise the culpability or impact. To do so would be to deal with these cases less robustly than warranted and, in effect pull up the drawbridge and refuse to take account of public anger. We have chosen to invoke serious sanctions which I believe are entirely justified by the sub committee’s report. In so doing, the intention is not only to apply standards that prevail in the world beyond this House but to strengthen the code of conduct and to help restore public confidence in this House.