Contribution
My Lords, I must apologise for being a little late; the annunciator was not operating properly in my room. I must also apologise that I am speaking and not my noble friend Lord Purvis. He has been at the funeral of my namesake in Kirkwall today.
I wish to talk about the broader issues in the Statement and, to quote the Statement, about what we need to do
“to rebuild trust in public life in the wake of the damaging revelations”
since the Prime Minister’s Statement last week. We all face the enormous problem now of longer-term decline in public trust in politics in this country and of what this will do to make it decline further. All of us, in all parties, need to resist scoring too many points against each other and to recognise that we have a common task to rebuild that public trust.
I hope that, in that sense, the Government will take this opportunity to push through some of the reforms that the Labour Party and others have talked about but have not yet found the courage to pursue fully. I note, incidentally, that Transparency International has just lowered the UK’s rating in its Corruption Perceptions Index, which is now much closer to the American level than to the level of most European democracies. That is where we are. So I hope the Government will take this opportunity to introduce significant reforms, which we hope will command cross-party support.
I hope that these will include parliamentary scrutiny for all senior public appointments. The noble Baroness, Lady Chapman, this afternoon hinted that His Majesty’s Government are already moving in this direction. Too much power and decision-making is concentrated in Downing Street. We all recognise that the Prime Minister has too many decisions to take. Parliamentary sovereignty is a convenient myth that covers Executive domination. Political decisions and appointments would be much more acceptable if government change were approved by Parliament.
Then we need to strengthen the guardians of ethics in public life. We need the Commissioner for Public Appointments, the Advisory Committee on Business Appointments, and the Independent Adviser on Ministerial Interests to be strengthened in their roles and perhaps given a statutory basis. We need to look at the status of the Ministerial Code, and please can we have the delayed publication of the revised Cabinet Manual, last revised far too long ago?
We need to consider whether the business of taking office for the Prime Minister and for Ministers should be changed, and whether they should take an oath, perhaps before their House of Parliament, as they take office? Maybe they should receive training. Most immediately, I hope that the Government will now bring in a strong elections Bill, with caps on donations, defences against foreign, state and private donations, and a properly independent Electoral Commission.
There are broader reforms which the Liberal Democrats would like to push for to move away from the confrontational style of Westminster politics: fewer Ministers, looser Whips, stronger committees, acceptance that multiparty politics means a more collaborative style of politics. I heard Andy Burnham, the Mayor of Manchester, say last week at the Institute for Government that a change in the voting system would make our politics less adversarial. I hope there are some within the Government who are considering that.
There are particular implications of this scandal for the Lords, for which the Labour Government have not yet delivered half of the reforms their manifesto promised. This has damaged the reputation of the Lords, and that means that we have to take those reforms further. We are a part-time House, so the question of outside interests and second jobs, which the noble Lord, Lord True, touched on, is much more difficult for us. Prime ministerial patronage on appointments should also come into consideration. Donors should not be appointed to the Lords, which is a working Chamber. There is a strong case for rules on outside interests and for retirement and participation limits, and we look forward to receiving those.
Lastly, does the Leader agree that the widest lesson we have to take from this is that it is not only politicians who need to regain public trust but those who run international finance: banks in New York and London, multinational companies and high tech? Most of these are based in America, but I note that the CEO of the bank which paid for my education and at which my father worked for 40 years is one of those named in the Epstein files. We should not underestimate the scale of the potential public reaction against financial as well as political elites. Will the Government therefore discuss with the City of London how it, too, needs to react to what is now coming out and what will no doubt continue to come out for some weeks to come?