House of Lords (Expulsion and Suspension) Bill [Lords] — House of Commons, 2015-02-27
Topic: Government Operations
Christopher Robert Chope (Conservative, Centre-right): I am delighted to hear that he is one of my hon. Friend’s constituents. I am sure it is just as well he does not have the chance to vote for my hon. Friend The noble Lord Wallace of Saltaire said: "I read the latest Code of Conduct again this morning, thinking that we need to be sure what we are on about"— I think that is always wise advice. He continued: "One of the issues that perhaps we need to discuss informally off the Floor is how far this measure is intended to refer only to conduct that is mentioned in the Code of Conduct or to egregious conduct of other sorts conducted by Members of this House. However, that is a question that we need not have in the Bill itself, but it is certainly a question that the Committee for Privileges and Conduct and others will need to consider at a later stage" I think this issue should be considered in the Bill. If we are to enable expulsion or suspension from the other place on the basis of breaches of conduct, we need to know whether the conduct needs to be linked in with the code of conduct under the Standing Orders or whether the provisions apply, as the noble Lord put it, to "egregious conduct of other sorts conducted by Members of this House".—[Official Report, House of Lords, 21 November 2015; Vol. 757, c. 650-51.] In discussing these issues, people sometimes bandy about expressions such as "bringing the House of Lords or Parliament into disrepute". Judgments about areas of conduct or behaviour can be extremely subjective. I hope that the promoter and indeed the Government, who have hitherto been slightly underwhelmed by the contents of the Bill, will accept that the wording needs to be much more precise than it is at present When the ill-fated 2012 legislation came before this House, it was withdrawn by the Government because of the threat of it being properly considered; they did not want it to be properly considered, so they decided that rather than have it considered without a guillotine, they would not have it considered at all. That Bill was withdrawn, but it made reference to suspension and expulsion on grounds of conduct, and it was linked with breaches of the House of Lords code of conduct. However, in this Bill, that has been dropped My hon. Friend the Member for Bury North (Mr Nuttall) inquired earlier why the provisions of this Bill were not included in the private Member’s Bill proposed by our hon. Friend the Member for North Warwickshire (Dan Byles). The answer is—it was given by our hon. Friend—that he did not want these provisions in his Bill because he thought they were far too controversial, and he wanted to get his Bill on the statute book, which he succeeded in achieving, before he retires from this House after one term in our Parliament. Rather than venture into an area of controversy, he decided to stick to the principles contained in his Bill, which enable expulsion on the ground that a person has been convicted and sentenced to a period of imprisonment in excess of one year, rather than go into this linkage with the code of conduct or conduct defined more widely, as it might be in due course by the noble Lord Wallace of Saltaire People are talking about bringing the House of Lords into disrepute, so in preparation for today’s debate I tried to establish how this could be viewed as analogous to the disciplinary processes in some firms where it is a disciplinary offence for an employee to bring the company for which the person works into disrepute. Case law in this area is fraught with difficulty. It is extremely difficult for an employer legally to control the actions of an employee outside their employment, and there is often little reason why an employer would wish to do so. However, the notion of an employee bringing the company into disrepute following actions in their personal life is one situation in which the parallel might occur.