Standards in Public Life

Lord Sentamu Excerpts

Tuesday 10th February 2026 Lords Chamber

[Baroness Smith of Basildon (Lab)]

I am grateful to my noble friend. I think it was last updated in 2011. My recollection is that even then its introduction was mainly about Brexit, which seems rather dated at this time. I cannot give any guarantees that it is an urgent issue at the moment, but I take on board what she has said. I think there is a need to ensure all these codes are updated and reviewed because they are a point of guidance to help us navigate our way forward when there are difficult issues.

[Lord Sentamu (CB)]

My Lords, I want again to thank the Leader of the House for the way she is conducting this conversation. I am also grateful to the noble Lord, Lord True, for his penetrating questions because only by tough questions do you get the answers, and those answers of course need to be questioned still.

In the country I was born in, Uganda, we have a saying that a very badly misbehaved child brings disrepute to the parents first, then to their brothers, their sisters, and the whole of the household, but you must not think there is a transference of the behaviour of that naughty child to everybody in the household. Certainly, we must be vigilant, but we must not drive ourselves into thinking that, because of the bad behaviour of somebody, everybody is just like that. The people that I have met since I joined the House in 2005 are mostly honourable people. They do their work, they carry it out at all hours, particularly of late when we have been sitting until very late in the morning, and none of them is actually doing it out of self-interest. We have just had our conduct reviewed by the noble Baroness, Lady Manningham-Buller. That is very robust. Please do not reinvent a similar thing as if we have not got it; we need to tell everybody out there that we have it.

Finally, I think the noble Lord, Lord Wallace of Saltaire, is right: in all our debates, however heated they are, may we try and be polite to each other and ask questions; we are part of the same household.

[Baroness Smith of Basildon (Lab)]

My Lords, when I first came into this House, I was told, pretty much, you could say anything you wanted as long as you were polite about it. That is actually quite a serious point. I think sometimes the tone of our debate and the politeness that we deploy when speaking lower the temperature, so we do not get the rudeness that we see in some other political forums.

On trust in public life, it is the bad apple syndrome, is it not? One person does something wrong and we are all tarred with the same brush: people think, “You’re in it for yourselves; you don’t believe in what you’re saying”. Yet we know that most people—the overwhelming majority of people in your Lordships’ House, as I said earlier—are here because of public service and they believe in what they do. As the noble Lord, Lord Wallace, mentioned about trust in public life, we do have a duty. The noble and right reverend Lord is right that we have a Code of Conduct and we should stick with that, but if he is asking me whether there is no area in it which can be reviewed and possibly improved, then I think, yes, we should say it can be reviewed and there is always room for improvement.

I take issue with the noble Lord, Lord Wallace, on one point, though. When he was speaking earlier, he described this as a part-time House. We are not a part-time House. We do not expect all Members to be here full-time; it is a full-time House where Members contribute when they can. I always wince slightly, when we sit longer and later than the other end of the building, that we should ever be called part-time.