Baroness Smith of Basildon (Lab)

I will take the noble Lord’s last point first. All avenues of investigation are open. All information on the national security issues will be passed to the ISC so that those issues can be looked at in detail. I have to say that, with several million documents, I certainly have not been through all the emails, but I find those that I have read pretty unedifying and unpleasant to read. There are people whose job it is to go through all these, look at every possible link and get to the bottom of whatever has happened. The noble Lord is absolutely right to raise the issue of political trust. If you think about the work this House does, most of it is painstakingly detailed work on legislation to try to get things right. I do not believe anyone in this House comes into public service to do a bad job, but, if things go wrong and Members do not reach the standards we would expect of them—and that the public would expect of us—then they abdicate their right to be here. On the points the noble Lord makes about the Ministerial Code, for example, that has already been strengthened: there is an independent level that was not there previously. Previously, the Prime Minister of the day could decide if somebody had broken the code and should be investigated. Now, it is for the holder of that code to make that decision on an investigation, which I think is a big step forward. Legislation is currently being drafted about removing peerages from those who should no longer be entitled to have them. There will be discussion on exactly what form that will take and how we do that. As I said in answer to the noble Lord, Lord Purvis, we want to get that right so that we are, in a sense, future-proofing so that, should any circumstances arise in the future where we think someone should not just not be a Member of this House but not be entitled to hold a peerage, that can be done in a processed, fair way. But it has to happen, and I think we can all think of other examples where it should have happened. How do we restore trust? If I knew the answer to that, they would probably make me Prime Minister. But it is a really serious point, because this has been going on for a very long time. Trust in politicians has been eroded over time, sometimes fairly, sometimes unfairly. It does not actually matter why: we need to ensure that we do everything we can—that, in our parliamentary and public-facing lives, we behave in a way such that people feel they can give us the trust we feel we deserve. If we do not, we have to move out of the public arena.