Committee on Standards in Public Life

Committee on Standards in Public Life
|

Main navigation

Latest News

Constant standards in a changing world

Notes for Remarks to The European Policy Forum, 13 November 2001

High standards in public life are crucial to the health of our liberal democracy

Let me begin tonight by explaining why I believe the issue of standards in public life is crucial to the health of liberal democracy in Britain today. I can do no better than to give you a quotation from the eminent philosopher, Stuart Hampshire.

‘Although the dividing line between private life and public responsibilities can never be definite and clear, there is a moral threshold which is crossed both by those who assume power to change the lives of many men through public action and by those who undertake to represent in a public role the will and interests of many other men. A new responsibility, and even a new kind of responsibility, and new moral conflicts, present themselves.’

‘Public & Private Morality (1978)’

As I see it, the task today of the Committee on Standards in Public Life is to set out ‘arrangements’ and I will come back to that word later, which helps men and women in public life to discharge that ‘new kind of responsibility’ to which Stuart Hampshire referred.

The origins of the Committee on Standards in Public Life

It was this very same task that led to the establishment of the Committee on Standards in Public Life by John Major in 1994. I am not going to rehearse the history of that time. But you will all recall the stories of sleaze, cash for questions and abuse of procedures for public appointments and so on.

Since 1994 in response to public concerns, the Committee has examined, in seven reports, virtually every institution of British public life. It has made recommendations covering a wide range of institutions to ensure the highest standards of propriety, including:

The stock take of the Committee’s work to date

So when I became Chair of the Committee, last Spring, I put in hand a stock take of those seven reports. As a result the Committee has just published a stock take of all 308 recommendations and 26 observations which it has made in its seven reports.

By a stock take I mean recording the response made to each recommendation and the action subsequently taken.

The stock take document makes no assessment of the material at this stage. But we intend to use it to review implementation, delivery and outcomes for the issues that fall within the Committee’s Terms of Reference.

We have some work ahead of us to make the most effective use of the material it contains.

Most of the Committee’s recommendations have been implemented

But you can see at a glance that most of the Committee’s recommendations have, over the years been implemented. As a result of the Committee’s work, virtually every aspect of our public life has new arrangements seeking to safeguard standards of conduct. We have recommended amongst others the establishment of:

The Committee takes a pragmatic approach

If you look at the Committee’s terms of reference, you will see that they are not written in high faluting, philosphical terms. The language is practical and pragmatic.

Sometimes the Committee on Standards in Public Life is termed ‘an ethics committee’. It is not a terminology I much like. But our terms of reference do not call upon the Committee to recommend codes of ethics.

Instead, the Committee is enjoined to ‘...make recommendations as to any changes in present arrangements...to ensure the highest standards of propriety in public life’.

Ethical standards cannot be differentiated

The presumption is that there are ethical standards and that what is needed are practical arrangements to make sure that they are reflected, and seen to be reflected, in public life.

My belief is that in a well functioning society, you cannot differentiate ethical standards between political life, business life or any other walk of life for that matter. Ethical standards are universal within any society.

Any society that seeks such differentiation will get itself into a muddle. The same basic ethical standards have to rule whatever the particular field of activity. To that extent, those ethical standards are universal within a society.

Ethical standards come from the people

I have deliberately used the word ‘society’, rather than ‘state’, to define the ambit for the universality of the ethical standards to which I have referred.

This is to underline my belief that ethical standards are founded in the beliefs, attitudes and behaviours of the citizens in our state. In short, ethical standards are people given, not state given.

I will describe towards the end of my remarks how the Committee in its next stage of work intends to identify more precisely what the British people hold those ethical standards to be.

The seven principles of public life

True to its practical and pragmatic vocation, the Committee fashioned for itself, right from the beginning, a sort of template in the form of the Seven Principles of Public Life. The Committee has systematically applied the Seven Principles in its seven reports to virtually every institution of public life.

The Seven Principles of Public Life have come to be a beacon that illuminates virtually every document produced by public institutions on standards of propriety in public life.

Every one active in public life now and in the future is in the debt of Lord Nolan’s original Committee for these seven principles – a sort of seven commandments for public office holders.

The seven principles set out behaviours expected of public officials

I chose for my theme today the title, ‘Constant Standards in a Changing World’.

Those Seven Principles of Public Life setting out the behaviours expected by public office holders are, I believe, the standard that we should grip in this changing world.

The Seven Principles were drafted solely with British circumstances in mind. But an OECD study, published in October 2000, looked at the mechanisms used by member countries to build values into public service. It is interesting to see that OECD identified core values that are to a large degree the same in each country.

So this OECD finding underlines that the behaviours prescribed in the Seven Principles have an integrity and validity that go above and beyond any current trends in thinking or the immediate pressures of a single crisis.

Changing public attitudes

When Graham Mather invited me to speak tonight, I read again his paper, ‘Making Decisions in Britain’. His thesis, stated in his own words is as follows:

‘...key decisions in daily life in Britain are taken by people who are not ministers and who usually have never sought to be elected to public office. Nor are they civil servants. They are instead members of agencies, authorities, boards, commissions and regulatory bodies... Compare British government today with British government in 1960. Then it was possible to suggest that ‘ministers ran the country’. Today it is not.’

Graham’s reference to British government in 1960 caused me to reflect on the prevailing attitudes to public standards in 1960.

In 1960, there was still a relatively cohesive culture of government in the UK. The governing class was a coherent body and there was a strong sense of club. Its members were supposed to observe a code of honour recognised by all.

It was a world of them and us. The media played by the rules of the club – because the media barons were fully paid up club members, and senior journalists enjoyed at least visiting membership. They helped reinforce the belief that there were a great many things the governed didn’t need to know or wouldn’t be good for them.

So by and large, those who were ‘them’ trusted those who were ‘us’, and all was well with ‘the powers that be’. The ‘great and the good’ rested, perhaps precariously in some cases, on a pedestal.

It is different now

Now the old establishment club has dissolved. The powers that be no longer be and the great and the good are no longer perched on a pedestal. Today, we live in a much more open society – and thank goodness for it.

As Graham argued, power has become fragmented in virtually every aspect of British political life. Administratively, powers that previously belonged to central government have been transferred to an assortment of Commissions and Councils, Authorities and Agencies.

Today, I do not intend to discuss the forces leading to the decline of the deferential society.

Nor do I want to debate whether standards of conduct in public life are higher or lower today than they were forty or fifty years ago. I just do not have the evidence to come to a judgement either way.

An assertion – people care more about standards

But I will hazard the judgement that the people care more about standards than they did forty years ago. And by care, I mean that people have a greater expectation that standards are maintained than they did forty years ago.

Not everyone will accept my assertion that people care more about standards in public life than they did forty or so years ago.

Some will argue that the people’s real interest is in the level and quality of service delivered by the public sector and that public interest in standards matters is whipped up by an intensely competitive media through a steady breeze of lurid allegations of this or that public office holder’s sleazy behaviour.

I disagree. I believe that the people do care about standards in public life and are right to care.

Indeed, standards in public life matter more than ever in the new form of government to which Graham Mather drew attention in his paper, ‘Making Decisions in Britain’.

In that Britain public office holders and public institutions must command the trust of the people that they serve. The people’s perceptions of the maintenance of high standards of conduct are almost as important as the reality. If this confidence is eroded, the basic foundations of our political society will be weakened.

The importance of institutions

My reference to public institutions prompts me to make a fundamental observation about the work of my Committee, and again it stems from our terms of reference.

The terms of reference direct the Committee’s attention to holders of public office. Everyone with a role of responsibility in a public institution has a personal responsibility for upholding the Seven Principles of Public Life.

But if you examine the Committee’s seven reports and 308 recommendations, they are almost all directed at institutions. That, I believe, underlines a factor of crucial importance.

A key to the maintenance of the highest standards of propriety in public life is proper safeguards – or ‘arrangements’ to use the word in our terms of reference – in individual institutions, supported by the right institutional culture.

So we need strong institutions.

But institutions which are responsive to the public concerns about standards of conduct.

That requires, above all, Leadership from those at the top of the institution – the leaders of public institutions must be seen to set the highest standards by personal example. The Committee has made clear that leaders of institutions share a personal responsibility for upholding the Seven Principles of Public Life and for ensuring that that the arrangements are in place for monitoring and maintaining standards throughout the institution.

Indeed, this leadership role to uphold the Seven Principles is now explicitly recognised for Ministers in the Ministerial Code which states that Ministers are expected to observe the Seven Principles of Public Life set out in the first report of the Nolan Committee.

Codes of Conduct

It is striking in the last decade Codes of Conduct have become favoured instruments to guide conduct and against which conduct can be judged. And I would guess that most, if not all, of the bodies with effective decision making powers listed in the table in Graham’s paper, have codes of conduct. And if they do not, there is guidance on the Cabinet Office web site to advise them on how to set one up.

In short, the proliferation of codes is symptom of the fragmentation of government that is referred to in Graham’s paper.

Indeed, code proliferation is as true for business as it is for government. In fact, business was in the code game before government – with the Cadbury Committee’s report published a year or so before my Committee’s first report, and followed by the Hampel, Greenbury, Turnbull and the current Combined Code.

So we are all governed by codes today. Indeed, last week the Department for Transport, Local Government and the Regions published model codes for a variety of local government bodies, such as:

Certainly, right from its inception, my Committee has been to the fore in urging the adoption of Codes of Conduct. And of course, we have our own, published for all to see on our web site.

If you examine the Codes which have emerged from the work of the Committee on Standards in Public Life, you can see a sort of model with five features, which usually emerges from the Committee’s work and from its implementation in the various public institutions:

Sometimes these codes of conduct have statutory backing, sometimes they rely on moral suasion or hortatory and exemplary force and sometimes while they lack statutory backing, they bring with them a strong element of compulsion.

In short, a mixture of hard law, soft law and pseudo-hard law, front door law, back door law and side door law to which Professors Rose and Page drew attention to in their stimulating study published by the European Policy Forum, ‘Law Making through the Back Door’.

It is perhaps significant that the nearer to central government, the more hortatory the code and the smaller the element of independent scrutiny.

Indeed, the Ministerial Code, the Civil Service Code and the Special Advisers Code have no legal force and are self-regulating without independent scrutiny, save for a very limited role for the Civil Service Commissioners in the case of the latter two codes.

But the DLTR codes, to which I referred earlier, are set out in secondary legislation.

Whether set out in secondary legislation or reliant on moral suasion, the key in my view is that there are adequate compliance mechanisms so that breaches of the codes can be investigated in a way that maintains public confidence that standards are being upheld in the institution.

Whose standards? The Committee’s survey of public attitudes

61. I said earlier that in my view ethical standards come from the people and I have spoken of public concerns about standards of conduct of holders of public office.

This immediately prompts the question, ‘How do you know what those concerns are?’ And this brings me to an important new programme of attitudinal research that the Committee has just launched.

Hitherto the Committee has sought to define the nature of the public concerns about standards of conduct on the basis of evidence taken during the preparation of its seven reports.

In fact, we know very little about the public’s attitude to these questions. So far as I am aware, little systematic research into standards of conduct has ever been conducted in Britain. So the evidential base for our work is somewhat second-hand, and we need to remedy this.

This is an important piece of work for the Committee. But it is difficult and complex. We are determined that the research should be of first class quality and authority, and it will form an important addition to our evidential base.

We intend to repeat the research at suitable intervals to see whether public opinion is changing. This is not because we want to compare the performance of one government against another.

I suspect the research will show that the public are more concerned about the broader and subtler concerns than playing one party against another. The important thing is that we shall have a way of finding out what those concerns are.

I have ranged widely in my remarks tonight. But as the various publications of the European Policy Forum testify, issues of governance are assuming new prominence. The Committee of Standards in Public Life will continue to be active in these changing times seeking to ensure, as its terms of reference require, the highest standards of propriety in public life.

Thank you.