Blair avoided signing party donor declarations

Downing Street officials ensured that Tony Blair did not personally have to sign official records stating the financial contributions to Labour made by people he was nominating for peerages. This was partly on the basis that it would be 'helpful' if he did not sign declarations which might turn out to be inaccurate. This is revealed in a document (see paragraph 6) which the BBC has received through a freedom of information request.

This happened a few months before the former Prime Minister proposed peerages for four businessmen who had made large secret loans to Labour.

In early 2005 his staff persuaded the independent House of Lords Appointments Commission, which vets the propriety of suggested Peers, that the required certificate setting out the nominees' party donations should not have to be signed by the Prime Minister.

The purpose of these certificates was to disclose any gifts to the party made by a proposed Peer and to assure the Commission that a peerage nomination was not connected to any such donations.

Blair's officials argued that 'if it turned out that a particular certificate was not entirely accurate, it would be helpful if the Prime Minister had not signed it.'

Their case also stemmed from 'the fact that the Prime Minister may not personally have the detailed knowledge of donations combined with the difficulty in his finding time to sign the certificate'.

This document is one of a batch I obtained from the House of Lords Appointments Commission under the Freedom of Information Act. HoLAC wanted to keep this material about Blair secret, on the basis that the officials' views had been provided in confidence, but was overruled by the Information Commissioner after I appealed.

These quotes appear in a paper prepared in January 2005 by the HoLAC secretariat. In the version originally and voluntarily provided to the BBC by HoLAC, this passage was blacked out. The Information Commissioner has now forced HoLAC to release the entire document, along with some other information it wanted to withhold.

HoLAC considered the secretariat paper at a meeting in February 2005 and decided to drop its proposal that the certificate should be signed by the party leader, allowing it instead to be signed by the party chairman.

This was a few weeks before Labour started taking large undisclosed loans around the time of the 2005 general election. Later that year four major lenders were then nominated by Tony Blair for peerages, provoking the 'cash for peerages' controversy when details of the loans eventually became public. A police investigation into the affair ended with no charges being brought. The nomination certificates for HoLAC, which did not mention the loans, were signed by the Labour party chair, Ian McCartney.

Relations between HoLAC and Downing St deteriorated sharply once the Commission started to consider these nominations, about which it had much unease. The conflict between them is made clear in other extracts from HoLAC meeting minutes which it has also now been forced to release.

HoLAC decided to oppose some of the prime ministerial nominations because they would have 'a negative effect ... on the reputation of the House of Lords'.

The minutes of one meeting show that the Commission felt that 'No 10 seemed to mis-understand the nature of the Commission's judgment'. At another point HoLAC expressed concern that No 10 was forwarding information about nominations 'without any comment on the propriety of this'. And when HoLAC members eventually found out about the secret loans, it recorded that 'it was agreed that non-disclosure of loans went against the spirit of the declaration'.

The enforced disclosures also reveal (paragraph 5 of the paper on vetting) that in early 2005 the Conservatives pressed HoLAC 'to be flexible' in its approach to its requirements that Peers should be UK residents. However the Commission decided that it would continue to insist on UK residency.

This issue of residency has become controversial in the case of certain Tory Peers. The Commission has expressed its disappointment at the failure of Lord Laidlaw to fulfil a pledge to become resident in the UK for tax purposes. The tax status of the Conservative Deputy Chairman Lord Ashcroft remains unclear.

The BBC is now pursuing a case at the Information Tribunal to seek the disclosure of some further extracts from the minutes of HoLAC meetings.

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