Paul White will probably judge his 7th decade as not being his finest. The 73 year old was not quite 70 when he had the Conservative whip removed, after a lifelong relationship with the Conservative Party as a result of a criminal enquiry into his misuse of expenses. Now three years later he has been accused of abusing expenses yet again. Yesterday it was hard to avoid his face for anyone who passed any newsstand as the Daily Mirror exploited their investigation into his clocking on and then quickly exiting the Palace of Westminster by a side door. His radio interviews were fascinating as he claimed that the first criminal investigation was unjustified and his prosecution was a travesty, that we could not understand how hard he really was working for his £300 daily allowance, nor that this was merely an effective way of paying people like him for all the good they do!

The interviews continued with a piece on World at One on Radio 4 from David Steel who was interviewed to try to explain how other members of the House of Lords were feeling. When the issue of the expenses for Lord Hanningfield was referred to, David Steel made a strange comment, stating that ‘I don’t even know what he [Lord Hanningfield] looks like’. Whilst there was no need for Lord Steel to know what Lord Hanningfield looks like to form a view, much less to have actually met him, even I knew what he looks like from his face appearing in the newspapers over the last 3 years. I have no argument with David Steel over this, but it seems like a strange thing to emphasise on national radio. However David Steel went on to explain how his own proposals for Lords reform had been developed in the Lords, but had recently been picked up by a Conservative MP, Dan Byles for his Private Members Bill. Lord Steel seemed disappointed that his Bill was only of interest to the Government since he had managed to interest a backbench Conservative of its merits. This appeared to overlook the fact that he had upset the Lib Dems in the Government by not being very supportive of their own legislative reform. Where I do have a concern about Lord Steel is in his resolute view that reform of our legislative processes should be left to professional politicians, who are in effect Turkeys voting for Christmas and have shown themselves to be so incapable of effective reform in the past.

The Third Lord whose views got an airing yesterday is Lord Hill who is Leader of the House of Lords. It is his job to ensure the House of Lords is well run. However he did not in any way suggest that the abuse by Lord Hanningfield was something he could be seen as accountable for, nor that his party, who expelled Hanningfield 3 years ago have any  responsibility for any of the other abuses by other Tory Peers. However he was certain that the Parties would solve the problem if allowed to do so. What his incomprehensibly ‘innocent’ approach seemed to overlook was that he was talking about the parties sorting out their bad apples, yet for 3 years Hanningfield has been without a Party. Who will address the abuse by Independent Lords? Will the Parties all gang up on the Crossbench Peers?

All three of these Lords are confident that any problems in the Lords, are best resolved by the Lords. This is surely nonsense. The Lords, just like their elected colleagues down the corridor need to accept that they have used up all their lives in this game of self regulation. We need some form of Independent agency that can determine not only what happens to people like Lord Hanningfield who are clearly unwilling to accept that they are at fault in their abuse of the system, but that agency also needs to address the system that Hanningfield seems to find so easy to abuse in its current format.

A final comment came from a fourth Peer, Lord Trimble who spoke on Newsnight late last night “What other professional person are you going to get to work for £300 a day?” This is a strange comment. There are many people whose work is charged out at much higher rates, but many of these only receive a small proportion of their fee, in any event there are many engineers for example whose income is far less than £300 per day. If we are to treat these Peers as Professionals, we need a proper debate on how many we need at anytime. There is also a question regarding if the Lords should be treated as Professionals? And finally what about market forces – I would happily be advised by David Trimble, but do not think he should be valued in the same was a Lord Hanningfield! We need a proper review and some urgent changes in this Chamber of ‘Professionals’