Accountability of the Lords debated after Mandelson raises Ashcroft tax questions

MPs raise the question of who might be responsible for scrutinising appointments under the previous body
Peter Mandelson visits Nottingham
Mandelson addressing the Lord Dearing memorial conference at Nottingham University. Photograph: Rui Vieira/PA

When Lord Mandelson released his letter calling for an inquiry into Lord Ashcroft's broken promises, the intention was to keep the story raging for a second day and to put maximum pressure on David Cameron's frontbench.

That plan appeared to backfire when at 7.09am the House of Lords appointments commission released a statement saying that because Ashcroft was appointed a month before the commission was created, it has no records of the appointment, or powers to investigate.

This started a new debate about accountability in the Lords, with its own members accusing the system of failing to hold peers to account for the promises made when they were appointed.

MPs raised the question of who might be responsible for scrutinising appointments under the previous body, the political honours scrutiny committee, and who had the power to hold members of the second chamber to account. The answer, in purest legal terms, seemed to be: no one.

Peers can only be removed by an act of parliament. They are appointed by the House of Lords commission, which is made up of seven members who consider the appointment of independent peers and vet recommendations from political parties for partisan ones. Its chair is Lord Jay of Ewelme, a former ambassador to France and former head of the diplomatic service.

The appointments commission, created in 2000, pre-empted the current cross-party move to bar non-doms from parliament. In 2005 it ruled it would no longer consider applications from non-doms, strengthening this in 2008 to ensure that anyone appointed to the Lords was committed to paying full UK tax on all their earnings for life.

But it remains a secretive system. The processing, vetting and interviewing is done with guaranteed confidentiality for all those concerned, unless a clause in the law is activated which suggests that the public interest is stronger than the individuals' right to privacy.

This was tested for the first time by the information commissioner, Christopher Graham, in the release of the details of Ashcroft's promise to become a UK resident, which triggered his admission yesterday. Last month Graham labelled the Tory leadership "evasive and obfuscatory" on the issue of Ashcroft.

The appointments commission's predecessor, the political honours scrutiny committee, which vetted Ashcroft, was disbanded in 2000. A question in parliament in December by the Labour MP Gordon Prentice, who was also behind the Ashcroft freedom of information request, revealed that the scrutiny committee's records are held by the Cabinet Office.

At the end of last year they were being considered for entry into the National Archives, which would release them after 30 years. Any records that are not selected for inclusion would be destroyed.

The Cabinet Office and No 10 are now under pressure to release those documents, but are likely to rely on them being dragged out through further FoI requests for fear of unilaterally breaking the confidentiality clause in the appointment process, or of exposing themselves to criticism that they are acting politically.

The information commissioner's ruling on the first FoI request is likely to be a precedent: in the face of the Tory party's "evasive" attitude to the issue, the Ashcroft issue has been ruled to be in the public interest.

The row also reveals an omission within parliamentary scrutiny.

While the Commons has several bodies responsible for vetting standards and privileges, the Lords has a privileges committee but effectively no body that could be charged with an inquiry into the Ashcroft affair.

The committee on standards in public life can investigate issues of impropriety, but not individual cases. Sir Christopher Kelly, the head of that committee, is pushing for this to change and his proposals were accepted by the crossbench peer Lord Eames in his inquiry into standards in the Lords last year.

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