Contribution
My Lords, I will not repeat what the noble Baroness, Lady Manningham-Buller, has already said in opening this debate, nor do I have time, sadly, to comment on the two amendments moved by my noble friends Lord Hailsham and Lord Hamilton of Epsom.
That said, I doubt that the noble Baroness elbowed her way to the front of the queue to chair the Conduct Committee, but we should be grateful to her that she was persuaded to take on the job. As a member of the Conduct Committee, I saw at first hand her skills as a leader, as a negotiator, as a manager of expectations and as a catalyst for consensus. Perhaps more importantly, I saw her as someone who cares deeply about fairness and justice. This new, shorter, decluttered, comprehensible code of conduct and guide are as good as they are very largely because of the noble Baroness, but I must also expressly thank the clerks to the committee, whose advice and drafting skills were of the highest quality. This House is in their debt.
As a member of the Conduct Committee from January 2022 until January this year, I heard many anxious but also perplexing contributions to the debate, outside the committee’s formal sessions, about the rules of conduct for this House. Happily, the evidence that we received in the committee—before the general election last year, I chaired some of the evidence sessions—from the party group leaders, including my noble friend Lord Forsyth, from the then Leaders of the House and of the Opposition and from the Convenor of the Cross Benches, as well as from outside interested parties, was universally thoughtful and helpful in informing our deliberations and conclusions.
Revising the code of conduct is not a mass participation activity. Despite affecting every one of us, the revision excited relatively little interest, perhaps because very few Members of this House breach the code. Most of us do not know who the commissioners or the members of the Conduct Committee are, be they Peers or lay members. It was therefore unsurprising that, despite reminders, only a handful of your Lordships responded to the call for evidence, but we were very grateful to those who did.
In my time on the committee, we had to deal with only a small number of breaches of the code. The overwhelming majority of us in this House are polite, kind, honest and decent towards each other and to those who work with us in Parliament. The exceptions were rare, but even then we were not dealing with people who were irredeemably bad. Mistakes happen. Technical breaches of the code occur. Things are said that, on reflection or earlier in the day, would not have been said. Most who were found to have broken the code accepted that they were wrong, were contrite and apologetic. I doubt they will do it again. On those occasions where we were concerned with more serious breaches, the problems not infrequently arose from diminished capacity and the afflictions of old age rather than malice.
Furthermore, quite a few complaints made about Members of your Lordships’ House were trivial and vexatious. There was a small number of regular complainants and, if the new code is approved, we will have a better way in which to allow the commissioners to deal with those that do not affect innocent Peers or those who have committed only minor or technical infractions, which can be dealt with by correction of the register. Overall, the new shorter code is such an improvement on its predecessor that it ought not, I hope, to attract the criticism that the earlier version experienced.
I do not have time to identify the new changes, but I want finally to turn to the question of the lay membership of the Conduct Committee. There are strong views for and against their being on the committee and I will not speak to that question now, but lay members are appointed for six years, twice as long as our own three-year term limit. That needs to be changed. I found the lay members to be dedicated people who took their work seriously and responsibly, but I do not understand why their terms should be twice the length of our own.