Parliamentary Standards Bill

My Lords, I declare an interest as the second chairman of the Committee on Standards in Public Life, following Lord Nolan, who is now, sadly, deceased. That committee strongly believed in self-regulation in Parliament. I want to begin with, and take as my leading text, a citation from the learned and able report of the Joint Committee on Parliamentary Privilege, which several speakers have mentioned today and whose chairman, the noble and learned Lord, Lord Nicholls of Birkenhead, entered the Chamber by fortune about three-quarters of an hour ago to hear this eulogistic citation from paragraph 3: ""Parliamentary privilege consists of the rights and immunities which the two Houses of Parliament and their members and officers possess to enable them to carry out their parliamentary functions effectively. Without this protection members would be handicapped in performing their parliamentary duties, and the authority of Parliament itself in confronting the executive and as a forum for expressing the anxieties of citizens would be correspondingly diminished"." To summarise, parliamentary privilege exists to protect Members of Parliament and thereby to benefit the public. If, by a Bill such as this, you diminish the House of Commons, you thereby injure the public. The events that took place in May and June, beginning with the disclosures in the Daily Telegraph, revealed a terrible situation where the public was angrier with Parliament than one has ever known in one’s life. There was a double whammy, because even when the first shock waves were going through the country, based on what was in the Daily Telegraph—its sales, no doubt, soared—a second lot of disclosures came from Parliament, no doubt as a result of the grindingly slow process that started with the defeat of the House of Commons in front of the High Court on 16 May 2008, when the court made an order for full disclosure, albeit subject to redactions, which produced those ludicrous publications with hardly a word or even the name of anybody visible. That was the double whammy, because it showed that, left to themselves, the Members of Parliament operating that system would have liked to reduce the amount of information in the public domain to those limited, unintelligible fragments. That dire situation called for a response. Should it have been mature, measured and consistent with the privileges and traditions of Parliament or a panic reaction designed to capture some laudatory headline in the tabloids, or even the broadsheets? I am afraid that the Prime Minister made it perfectly clear in what he said on 10 June that the route to be followed was that of panic. Now, in reading this passage I bear in mind what the Leader of the House told us this afternoon: that it is no longer the view of the Prime Minister that this Bill should apply to the House of Lords. I would interpret that to mean that it would not even be a model for a Bill. At the time, however, before the U-turn, the Prime Minister referred to a meeting of "the Government’s democratic council", which was going to, ""bring forward … proposals … First, we propose that the House of Commons—and subsequently the House of Lords—move from the old system of self-regulation to independent, statutory regulation. That will mean the immediate creation of a new Parliamentary Standards Authority, which will have delegated power to regulate the system of allowances. No more can Westminster operate in ways reminiscent of the last century, whereby Members make up the rules and operate them among themselves"." He went on to refer to other powers that would be given to that authority and added: ""I welcome the cross-party support for these proposals".—[Official Report, Commons, 10/6/09; col. 796.]" In the inner room, no longer smoke-filled, a deal of some sort was, no doubt, done with the leaders of the parties—foolishly, in my opinion—that it was in the interests of all parties that the Bill should be bustled out with that strong-arm appearance. If you stand back and think about the situation, you see that it is very grave for the Members of Parliament down the Corridor and, as the noble Lord, Lord Crickhowell, pointed out, for their successors, who will soon be here—possibly a 50 per cent different team of men and women. But what was the Prime Minister saying in that passage? It was, surely, that the Members of the House of Commons are not to be treated as fit to regulate their own affairs or to conduct self-regulation. Either that is a condemnation, which will add to the worries expressed by the noble and learned Lord, Lord Howe, and others about what is happening to the morale of Parliament, or it is a pure funk that, in order to please the media, some new, external body must appear and have an authority over the House of Commons that, with such knowledge as I have, I believe is without parallel in parliamentary history. The Star Chamber was abolished in 1641. It is as if King Charles walked into Parliament in 1643 saying, "Do you know what I’m going to do? I’ve decided that you made a mistake when you abolished the Star Chamber. I’m going to set up a body that is superior to you and can give orders to Members of Parliament on how they are to behave". That is inconceivable, for Parliament is sovereign; you cannot create a body out there with those powers. In an election, the electorate can get rid of Parliament but not of those other bodies that are superior to Parliament. I submit to your Lordships that the creation of that new, outside body is wholly unnecessary. I entirely adopt what the noble Lord, Lord Armstrong of Ilminster, said. If you reflect maturely on it, why should you not create a system for self-regulation? You can have any amount of assistance on the financial side. The four great chartered accountancy companies that do all the mega-audits—although they were criticised yesterday, on some grounds that I have forgotten—could be asked, "Will you set up a panel for us, that will immediately—the same day, or the next—review any submission for expense or allowance made by any Member of Parliament?". That panel could adjudicate on whether the claim had been supported by the mortgage or whichever receipt. You could set up any amount of independent assistance to help to ensure total integrity and remove all opportunities for people to say, "They are up to their tricks, or stealing, or doing things in a sly manner by flipping from one second home to another". You could eliminate all of that with the greatest of ease, but you do not need to impose that additional, outside body on Parliament. There is a need to look at, with reflection and mature consideration over the vacation or long recess, what system could be put up in place, in light of the forthcoming recommendations from the Committee on Standards in Public Life, which, as now constituted, has undertaken the role of producing new guidelines. One very much hopes that its guidelines will say, "This is how we ensure integrity on the financial side, and we will make recommendations on a wise way of ensuring that that is complied with". Then there can be no more criticism of the sort that the Daily Telegraph has carried. I agree, then, with the noble Lord, Lord Armstrong of Ilminster, and with other speakers: this approach is completely wrong. It is totally contrary to history. It negates the privileges conferred in 1689; noble Lords may remember the words about there being no interference with the proceedings in any court or any other place. The committee that the Bill creates is another place, where the proceedings in Parliament would be interfered with. Let us get rid of all that and devise a system that is consistent with our history.