The Regulation of Standards in British Public Life: Doing the Right Thing?

Hine and Peele's book can best be described as ‘A Tale of Two Committees’. The Committee on Standards in Public Life (CSPL) and the Public Administration Select Committee (PASC) emerge as consistent threads in the development of ethics regulation in the United Kingdom since the 1990s. The influence of the CSPL, in particular, has been significant. Following the ‘cash-for-questions’ affair in 1994, when it was alleged that two Members of Parliament had been bribed in exchange for asking parliamentary questions, the need for a stronger ethics framework became a priority. The authors lucidly chart the development of that ethics framework with significant detail. They explore how ethics regulation has impacted the political system and assess the consequences of the values that have been generated. Through that exploration, they seek to offer an understanding of how ethics regulators operate, and to decipher the problems they have encountered.