Lords Commissioner for Standards finds Lord Freud breached Code of Conduct

The House of Lords Commissioner for Standards has today published a report in which she finds that Lord Freud breached the House of Lords Code of Conduct by failing to act on his personal honour by a signing a letter sent with a number of MPs to Lady Justice Thirlwall and Dame Victoria Sharp asking them to consider issues raised by the potential release of character references provided to the court about former MP Charlie Elphicke in the course of his criminal trial.

The report says that, although Lord Freud said that the letter was only intended only to raise matters of principle, the only reasonable reading of the letters is that they were intended “to persuade Lady Justice Thirlwall and Dame Victoria Sharp to intervene” on the decision of the trial judge, Mrs Justice Whipple, about whether to release the references.

The Commissioner concludes that in signing the letters Lord Freud was acting in his capacity as a Member of the House of Lords and the action therefore comes under the scope of the Code of Conduct. She finds that by seeking to use his position as a parliamentarian in private correspondence to influence an active court, Lord Freud’s conduct was outside the standards of conduct expected of individual members by the House as a whole and therefore constituted a failure to act on his personal honour.

However, the Commissioner accepts Lord Freud’s explanation that he was acting to assist members of the public rather than for his own benefit, and that he now regrets signing the letters and gives him credit for that admission. She therefore concludes that the case can be dealt with by remedial action and has agreed with Lord Freud that this should take the form of a personal statement of apology to the House. Lord Freud is expected to make that statement in the House of Lords later today.