The Hanningfield case has made a mockery of the House of Lords
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Version 0 of 1. Today the House of Lords votes on whether or not to suspend Lord Hanningfield for one year. This is a man who was first sentenced to prison for nine months for expenses fraud. Yesterday the Lords' privileges and conduct committee recommended his suspension for claiming the £300 daily allowance without doing any parliamentary work on 11 separate occasions. What other workplace in modern Britain functions in this way? No other organisation would allow employees to clock on and clock off and claim £300 tax-free without doing a day's work; nowhere else would be so lenient about a transgression that amounts to theft. The maximum punishment that can be awarded to Hanningfield is a year's suspension, whereas normal workers in similar situations would be sacked – and in no other circumstances would a coterie of fellow workers pass final judgment. As an "employer" the House of Lords is about as lenient as they come. Back in 2012 Hanningfield was readmitted to the Lords after serving a quarter of his nine-month jail term. That year alone three other peers were allowed back into the hallowed chamber after a stint in prison: Lord Black of Crossharbour returned after three years in a US jail for fraud; Lord Taylor of Warwick served his time for fiddling expenses, like Hanningfield; and Lord Watson of Invergowrie came out of jail for starting a fire and went straight back into the Lords. Its almost as if there is something about the place that encourages a sense of entitlement, of being above the law. But the Hanningfield case really has made a mockery of the House of Lords – as if it wasn't already something of a laughing stock. Foreign visitors unfamiliar with the Lords tend to see it, at first sight, as a quaint throwback in line with Britain's reputation for being a bit old-fashioned. But when they realise this is our second parliamentary chamber and it has considerable lawmaking powers, that amusement quickly turns to shock. As both a workplace and a political institution, the House of Lords is an anachronism. It may be hard to find many peers as utterly shameless as Hanningfield, but most are fairly brazen in propping up a part of our constitution which gives us more unelected than elected legislators. On being appointed, even those who have paid lip-service to reform tend to become quick converts and start to praise the chamber for its varied and respected expertise. They ignore the significant gaps in that expertise, or the fact there are better ways of bringing up-to-the-minute technical knowledge into politics – for example, through expert witnesses to committees, or by politicians building up knowledge over time. Hundreds of peers simply do not turn up for work. Ironically, it is only because about half of them fail to show up that the chamber can function at all. If the other half were regularly in attendance there would be no space. It is the workplace equivalent of a company with a payroll twice the size it should be, and an extravagant hiring policy in place with no end in sight. As the Lords gets bigger, the case for reform gets ever more pressing. Elections to the second chamber would drag this relic into the 21st century and allow for the kind of transparency and accountability which would prevent cases like Hanningfield's from dragging our politics through the mud. Reform would give us an opportunity to overhaul the rules: lawmakers should be judged by the electorate and the law, not by their colleagues; and their job should be regulated just as strictly as any other. Hanningfield's behaviour may be unpalatable, but it has at least achieved one thing: it has made the case for an elected second chamber incontestable. It is time the political parties grasped the nettle of Lords reform once and for all. |