Baroness Fox of Buckley (Non-Afl)

My Lords, listening to some of the conversation, I have become slightly anxious that the Bill will end up as some sort of “Ministry of Truth”. Although I am very keen on the pursuit of truth, we have to be careful that it does not stifle our ability to speak freely. I am going to speak to a couple of groups of amendments next week, but I want to say at this point that the amendments from the noble Lord, Lord Carlile, are hugely important. The dangers of self-incrimination, over-legalisation and over-criminalising that the Bill brings about could have the very opposite effect of candour and lead, in effect, to people lawyering up and shutting up. What you want people to feel is that they can speak the truth in good faith without constantly thinking they are about to be blamed or held criminally liable when they acted in good faith, as it were. It is of course very difficult to decide what good faith is, but we know that there are already duties of candour in the health service, as noble Lords have said, and that has not led to more truthfulness or candour. Actually, it has led to a much more cynical closing down of debate. Saying that we should have parliamentary privilege is always very difficult, especially in an unelected Chamber. One is very conscious of the fact that you are given rights that should perhaps be afforded to the rest of the population. Maybe it is in these Chambers that we have more weaselly definitions of truth, what is truthful and what is candour than anywhere else. However, I still insist that parliamentarians must be able to speak candidly all the time and to speak out. So, I would not extend the Bill to parliamentarians, because I am worried about an atmosphere in which parliamentarians already will not be open and honest. I do not want to have to listen to another politician say—I do not mean here, but when I am, as it were, a member of the public listening to the radio or watching the TV—“As you know, we are not able to comment at this time because of the process” or “because there is a process that needs to be followed”. That is the opposite of candour. My point is that we do not want anything else that will stop people speaking out. Finally, we should consider the issues the noble Baroness, Lady Jones, raised in relation to universities. One of the things she said that was very compelling was that when institutions sometimes lose perspective about what their roles are, they can get themselves into trouble. The people I know who work in universities, for example, are no longer considered just academics but are asked to be social workers and would-be parents. There is in fact a real infantilisation of students. Academics are expected to have so much duty of care that they have got to the point where they cannot teach. If anything, we need to make sure that the particular function of an organisation or administration is narrowly drawn, rather than covering everything. One of the reasons why so many of our public sector organisations get into the mess they do is that they have forgotten what they were meant to be doing—which they now neglect and do not do very well—and have taken on a lot of things they are not expert in. Universities are now in a situation where they are covering up, precisely because they have forgotten what they were there to do. We are here to tell the truth, and we should at least do that without fear or favour. I do not want another code of conduct imposed on parliamentarians. That will not lead to more truth; it will just lead to more—I am not doing very well at this myself—choosing our words too carefully instead of being frank and thinking out loud and trying to solve problems. We will end up just watching our backs, and that is the very thing we do not want to come from the Bill.